Books in the Law in the American West series

On the night of 16 October 1892, a double homicide occurred on Otay Mesa in San Diego County. Within minutes, neighbors subdued the alleged killer, Jose Gabriel, a sixty-year-old itinerant Native American handyman. The murder trial of Gabriel highlights the legal injustices committed against Native Americans in the 19th century.

Examines the historical context and significance of the Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854. This title treats American political culture of the 1850s; American territorial history; the roles of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and Frederick Douglass in the creation and implementation of the law; and, the comparative impact on Nebraskans and Kansans.

A case study of the Dawes Act in application, and an examination of Kiowa resistance to allotment.

Offers a case study of law and legal culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, during the nineteenth century. Mark R. Ellis argues that nascent nineteenth-century Great Plains communities shared an understanding of the law that allowed for the immediate implementation of legal institutions such as courts, jails, and law enforcement.

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 the first history of the Nebraska Supreme Court and the first book-length study of a Great Plains supreme court. James W. Hewitt draws on his intimate knowledge of the subject matter gleaned from years as a lawyer in Nebraska and applies a historian's objectivity to the analysis.

For most of the ninety-three years between 1851, when the California State Legislature faced the problem of what to do with criminals, until 1944, when it finally organized the state's four prisons into one adult penal system, the prisons at San Quentin and Folsom were the only places of incarceration for the state's felons. Bookspan traces the development of a system emphasizing deterrence and retribution to one receptive to reform and rehabilitation. "This is the story," writes Bookspan, "of the penury and personality struggle through which California developed a prison system to assess, and to address, individual needs while retaining its custodial institutions. It is a story of the West, even though eastern penology, with all of its overtones of moral duty, provided the language for prison reform. In a state where chaos preceded the assertion of normative rule, fear, not hope, formed the governing principle of penology. It is a story of America because true reform on an expanded sense of individual potential."

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.

Although much of Kansas law reflects US law, the state court's arbitrary powers over labor-management conflicts, yellow dog contracts, civil rights, gender issues, and domestic relations set precedents that reverberated around the country. This work presents the history of a state through the use of its Supreme Court decisions as evidence.

In 1973 the small, southwest Nebraska railroad town of McCook became the unlikely scene of a grisly murder. More than forty years later, author James W. Hewitt returns to the scene and unearths new details about what happened. In Cold Storage takes readers through the evidence and draws new conclusions about what really happened on that fateful September night.

Offers a rare inside view of what it means to be a federal judge - the nuts and bolts of conducting trials, weighing evidence, and making decisions

The Omaha Tribe of Nebraska has borne more than its fair share of the burden created by the federal government's wildly vacillating Indian policy. Mark R. Scherer's Imperfect Victories provides a detailed examination of the Omahas' tenacious efforts to overcome the damaging effects of shifting directions in federal policy during the last fifty years.