Böcker av Gordon Morris Bakken

Until the early twentieth century, printed invitations to executions issued by lawmen were a vital part of the ritual of death concluding a criminal proceeding in the United States. In this study, Gordon Morris Bakken invites readers to an understanding of the death penalty in America with a collection of essays that trace the history and politics of this highly charged moral, legal, and cultural issue. Bakken has solicited essays from historians, political scientists, and lawyers to ensure a broad treatment of the evolution of American cultural attitudes about crime and capital punishment.Part one of this extensive analysis focuses on politics, legal history, multicultural issues, and the international aspects of the death penalty. Part two offers a regional analysis with essays that put death penalty issues into a geographic and cultural context. Part three focuses on specific states with emphasis on the need to understand capital punishment in terms of state law development, particularly because states determine on whom the death penalty will be imposed. Part four examines the various means of death, from hanging to lethal injection, in state law case studies. And finally, part five focuses on the portrayal of capital punishment in popular culture.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a revolutionary period in the lives of women, and the shifting perceptions of women and their role in society were equally apparent in the courtroom. Women Who Kill Men examines eighteen sensational cases of women on trial for murder from 1870 to 1958.

Bakken addresses important issues of constitutional history in the context of a seminal period in the history of the American West. Bakken outlines the issues of public policy which the constitution makers faced: issues ranging from resource allocation and taxation to the role of corporations in the community.

?This book is clearly one of the five best works ever written on the legal history of the American West. It represents the definitive study of nineteenth-century legal contract, water, labor, and corporations law in the Rocky Mountain region broadly defined. It is a monograph that belongs in every college library and on the shelf of scholars of the West and of the law.?-The Journal of American History

Combines collective biography with an analysis of the function of the bar in a rapidly changing socioeconomic setting. This work shows how law practice changed with the establishment of large firms and bar associations, and how the state's boom-and-bust economy made debt collection the lawyer's bread and butter.

This is a thought-provoking exploration of the development of civil law in California from 1850 to 1890. Finally, he demonstrates that the law was less certain and the policy considerations less clear when the law actually functioned on an operational level in society.