Law

Isolated by geology and passed over by development, the vast, waterless tablelands of the Edwards Plateau of Texas became the stage for one of the great nineteenth-century dramas of Western justice....

Michael Ariens proves that no state possesses a richer or more surprising legal history than Texas. In narrative as engaging as it is accessible, he has produced an overarching consideration of Lone...

In a career forged in the saddle on scout duty along the Rio Grande, Arthur Hill witnessed dramatic changes from 1947 to 1974. Whether inspecting brands, deterring smugglers of everything from cattle...

Traces the maturing of the frontier legal system through engaging, colorful anecdotes and case histories – from the days of “Judge Lynch and Judge Winchester” to the era of Judge Blackstone and a modern system of fair courtroom trials.

Illicit sex is the catalyst in all the Texas murder trials recounted here. In each account the victim, at least in the perception of the defendant, had committed some sexual misconduct. In every case the defendant opened fire with premeditated intent to kill. And in all the resulting trials, the defense relied at least in part on “unwritten law.” From the 1880s until after World War I, formal penal code seemed insufficiently stringent to southerners demanding redress for sexual misconduct. “Unwritten law” seemed to justify the killing—or at least maiming—of almost anyone who by actual physical contact or inappropriate comment offended southern notions of female virtue, male honor, or sanctity of marriage. In this third book drawn from the legal annals of the American frontier, attorney Bill Neal explores the imaginative machinations of defense lawyers who outmaneuvered prosecutors and judges to extricate their obviously guilty clients. These courtroom triumphs and...

In 1876, the United States launched the Great Sioux War without a formal declaration of war by Congress. During the nineteenth century, the rights of American Indians were frequently violated by the...

In 1894, George Isaacs, the penniless black sheep of his family, was running with the worst of the outlaws in the Oklahoma Territory. There, a get-rich-quick scheme that seemed foolproof was hatched...

Few works reveal anything about the role of federal judges in the early twentieth-century American West. Arnon Gutfeld fills that void by analyzing the major issues and dilemmas those judges faced as...

In 1916, in the tiny West Texas town of Benjamin, a gunman slips into a courtroom and murders the defendant. In 1912, in Fort Worth’s finest hotel, a young man kills an old gentleman in cold blood in the middle of the lobby. The verdict in both of these murderers’ trials? Not guilty. The explanation? “This is Texas.” Laws passed by politicians in far-off Austin meant little to Westerners living on the Texas frontier. Sagebrush justice relied less on written statutes than on common sense, grass-roots fairness, and vague notions of folk law drawn from the Old South’s Victorian code of chivalry and honor. In this very different time and place, a murderer might go free based on the following reasoning: “The son-of-a-gun is guilty all right, but we must turn him loose. He owes me for a pair of boots, and if we convict him I’ll never get my...

On a horrific night in October 1975, Erwin Simants brutally murdered six members of the Henry Kellie family in tiny Sutherland, Nebraska. Massive media attention to the grisly story soon spawned a historic collision between two of the most cherished American constitutional protections—the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press and the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial before an impartial jury. Rights in the Balance is the story of the complex legal battles set in motion that tragic night on the western Nebraska plains. In juxtaposition to the criminal prosecution of Erwin Simants, Mark Scherer traces the Nebraska Press Association’s battle to overturn a gag order imposed on the media by state court judges. Prohibited from publishing certain details about the crimes and the Simants prosecution, the association set its own arduous legal course that would lead ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court...