Bøger af Michael Meltsner

Crisscrossing Manhattan, Jeremy, a New York lawyer uneasy with success, confronts his doubts through a series of encounters with the hard-edged, unpredictable life of the city. Revealed through these meetings, friendships and events are war stories of the courtroom and of the analytic couch; memories of Lenny Bruce and Jackie Robinson; the wiles of clever lawyers, Washington in-fighters, of a boss called the Soft Killer, of celebrity poker players and would-be reformers; recollections of frontier Israel and rural Georgia in the sixties. Behind Jeremy lies a brash West Side youth spent amid ethnic gangs and McCarthyism, the special ways of an only child, an idealist out of phase... These are a few ingredients of the provocative milieu of Short Takes, Michael Meltsner's unsettling first novel about a lawyer for whom love and work are always intertwined, a man who no longer believes in rules but continues to live by them. Jeremy is a lover who refuses to let go, a New Yorker at odds with the harsh pace and fractious spirit of his city until in the end he negotiates his own terms. Previously published in hardcover by Random House, this novel is newly republished in paperback and eBooks by Quid Pro Books. "Short Takes, Michael Meltsner's engaging and extremely well written first novel, creates a character of enormous vitality and considerable charm: funny, caring, searching and all-too-humanly paradoxical." -Boston Globe "In 'The Trial' Kafka's Joseph K. tries to discover what sort of crime he is charged with. In 'Short Takes' Jeremy tries to discover his innocence. The difference is interesting... 'Landscape is character, ' according to Henry James, and some of 'Short Takes' is about Jeremy's relationship to New York City. 'The most abiding problem I have about New York, he says, is the need to explain it. In Manhattan, no one can suspend disbelief... problems are too large for solution and can only be managed.'" -The New York Times "The real triumph of Short Takes is that it not only rings true but affirms the pleasures of lawyering... Confusion is the hallmark of modern times--and deep down, both Mr. Meltsner and Jeremy are aware that the ambiguities of urban life and lawyering have a vast richness." -Tamar Lewin, in National Law Journal

This book tells the dramatic story of twenty-eight law students--one of whom was the author--who went south at the height of the civil rights era and helped change death penalty jurisprudence forever. The 1965 project was organized by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sought to prove statistically whether capital punishment in southern rape cases had been applied discriminatorily over the previous twenty years. If the research showed that a disproportionate number of African Americans convicted of raping white women had received the death penalty regardless of nonracial variables (such as the degree of violence used), then capital punishment in the South could be abolished as a clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Targeting eleven states, the students cautiously made their way past suspicious court clerks, lawyers, and judges to secure the necessary data from dusty courthouse records. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, they managed--amazingly--to complete their task without suffering serious harm at the hands of white supremacists. Their findings then went to University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, who compiled and analyzed the data for use in court challenges to death penalty convictions. The result was powerful evidence that thousands of jurors had voted on racial grounds in rape cases.>A Virginia native who studied law at UCLA, BARRETT J. FOERSTER (1942-2010) was a judge in the Superior Court in Imperial County, California. MICHAEL MELTSNER is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University. During the 1960s, he was first assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His books include The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer and Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

Offers an account of how as a lawyer for Muhammad Ali, for the doctors who ended Jim Crow at American hospitals, and for scores of death row inmates, the author became a deeply involved activist in the civil rights movement. This book is useful to lawyers and to students of the history of the 1960s, civil rights, and African American studies.