American Liberty and Justice

Homer Maxey was a war hero, multimillionaire, and pillar of the Lubbock, Texas, community. During the post-World War II boom, he filled the West Texas horizon with new apartment complexes, government...

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...

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...

Owyhee County, Idaho, also known as the “Big Quiet,” is the largest and least inhabited area in the lower forty-eight states. Who has decided how to use it? From violent mine wars in the mid-nineteenth...

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...

Although the United States is a nation founded by immigrants, Alberto R. Gonzales and David N. Strange believe that national immigration policy and enforcement over the past thirty years has been inadequate....

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...

Mary Bennett Love had a physicality exceeded only by her personality. Six feet tall and over 300 pounds, Love was anything but shackled by the mores of her day. In the 1840s, she moved west from Arkansas...