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By Root 1878 0

has been increased interest, not surprisingly, in the intersection between race, gender, crime, and criminal justice. An important recent work on the criminal law of slavery is Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (1988); see also Arthur E. Howington, What Sayeth the Law: The Treatment of Slaves and Free Blacks in the State and Local Courts of Tennessee (1986); and Daniel J. Flanigan, The Criminal Law of Slavery and Freedom, 1800-1868 (1973). Roger Lane, in Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (1986), argues that discrimination separated the black population “uniquely” from the “experience of the urban industrial revolution” (p. 140) and tries to connect this fact with the criminality of black ghettos. Many studies of the civil rights movement have material on southern justice and the blacks. Dan T. Carter’s fine book on the Scottsboro case, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1969), is a rich case study of the problem.

Other minorities have gotten much shorter shrift. The Chicano experience is recounted in Alfredo Mirande, Gringo Justice (1987). Adequate accounts of Native American criminal justice, and the experience of Native Americans in Anglo courts, are yet to be written. Two books worth noting are John P. Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (1970), and Yasuhide Kawashima, Puritan Justice and the Indian: White Man’s Law in Massachusetts, 1630-1763 (1986). On women and the criminal justice system, we have already mentioned N. E. H. Hull’s Female Felons for the colonial period. Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (1981), deals with women’s prisons. Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (1987), covers wife-beating, child abuse, and related subjects; another good study is Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (1988). There is a lot of useful information on gender and law, including historical data, in Deborah Rhode’s book, Justice and Gender (1989).

Political crimes, and political aspects of criminal justice, are mentioned or dealt with in a number of the studies already mentioned; for example, Haring’s book on the police. For the twentieth century, there is Steven E. Barkan, Protesters on Trial: Criminal Justice in the Southern Civil Rights and Vietnam Antiwar Movements (1985), a thoughtful study, written by a social scientist with firsthand experience of political justice; Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (1987); and Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (1982). Military justice is treated in Jonathan Lurie, Arming Military Justice, Volume 1, The Origin of the United States Court of Military Appeals, 1775-1950 (1992).

The death penalty has been controversial for more than two centuries, and it has generated quite a bit of scholarly interest. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (1989), is one of the most interesting and imaginative of these. Everybody seems interested in murder, too, and there are dozens of popular books about murders in this or that city or period; but if you want scholarly rigor, there is not much to recommend. One outstanding exception is Roger Lane’s book, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1979).

It is no surprise that criminal procedure has not produced a rich historical literature; and for most readers the legal literature will be tedious, to say the least. Duty requires me to mention two old but indispensable books by Lester B. Orfield, Criminal Appeals in America (1939) and Criminal Procedure from Arrest to Appeal (1947). These are the sort of books that nobody (including myself) could possibly have the stomach to actually read from cover to cover; still, we are all