This provocative, headline-grabbing expose sheds disturbing light on the massive shortcomings of the FBI crime lab--sure to open the eyes of the public and cause great controversy.

Science and law approach problems and arrive at solutions in completely different ways. Law arrives at conclusions by taking established principles and applying them to new facts, a deductive process. Science arrives at conclusions by observing facts, creating hypotheses and testing them, an inductive process. Law relies upon precedence and procedure. Science is innovative and iconoclastic.

Uses case studies to examine how investigators collect genetic evidence and discusses how DNA has altered crime-solving and the court system as well as the ethical ramifications of cloning, genetic modification, and the death penalty.

In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt? Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.

John Banville’s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer. Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could. Like a hero out of Nabokov or Camus, Montgomery is a chillingly articulate, self-aware, and amoral being, whose humanity is painfully on display.

A book for thoughtful readers--and not particularly lawyers or scholars of law and society--who are engaged in the issues of the day and want something other than "easy" answers from the right and left. Most issues of law and social policy can be understood better through a lens that balances rights and interests--and protects all of us while protecting each of us--says renowned communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni in his latest of 30 books. In Law in a New Key, Etzioni addresses hot-bed issues of terrorism, drone warfare, airport security and scanners, government surveillance, norms of social disapproval and forgiveness, human rights, and respect for ethnic cultural differences. He shares his perspective as one who has fought in a resistance, and then later became a professor at Columbia University and The George Washington University. The perspective and his decades of academic research persuaded him that the answer to thorny legal and policy issues is found neither in unyielding devotion to individual rights at all costs nor in reflexive empowerment of the state in times of crisis and pain. The answer is in moral dialogs, respect for the basic right to life and security, responsible checks on power, and a balancing of interests that all must be seen as legitimate in a world of pundits and partisans who favor one right. What good is the right to privacy if the basic right to live is sacrificed as the right-holder is blown out of the sky? If new technologies make it possible to conduct terrorism and crime without the law catching up to them? What happens when respect for one religious position means choosing among religious positions? A collection of 15 trenchant essays drawn from the popular press and academic journals, yet accessible to a spectrum of readers who care about the key issues of the day and see the complexity in them, Law in a New Key takes a fresh look at so many important topics that need examination through a community-concerned lens. The frame gives contours and substance to today's debates without offering the usual entrenched policy solutions of kneejerk partisans. Etzioni asks such questions frankly, and on a variety of topics that matter. Rights carry responsibilities, and freedom and human rights must put living first--in a world that does not always concede that self-evident proposition. It is book about law and society whose time has come. For many readers the social and legal notes he plays will finally sound in their register.