Law School Lowdown & More

On March 18, 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright. The Court unanimously ruled that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a court-appointed attorney if they cannot afford their own. In "Chasing Gideon" Karen Houppert chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on Gideon's promise. "Chasing Gideon" provides crucial insight into our attempts to implement this fundamental constitutional right.

In 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon (portrayed by Henry Fonda) is arrested on charges of petty theft. Unable to afford an expensive lawyer to defend him, he is forced to represent himself and receives a five-year prison sentence. He becomes a model inmate and jailhouse scholar, focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees U.S. citizens the right of due process. With the help of an attorney (played by Jose Ferrer), Clarence makes a startling discovery that changes everything. The film is based on a true story.

The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were at its vanguard. In the late 1940's, parents began to file desegregation law suits with their daughters which forced Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. The author also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for reaching across the color line in public schools.

John Grisham's first work of non-fiction explores the arrest and conviction of a former minor league baseball player in a small town in Oklahoma who, after serving eleven years on Death Row, was exonerated by DNA evidence and subsequently released.

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.

Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

This is the improbable-but-true memoir of redemption -- the story of a young bank robber who became the greatest jailhouse lawyer in American history, and changed not just his own life, but the lives of everyone around him. Only twenty three and potentially facing twelve years in Illinois’ Pekin Federal Prison for bank robbery, Shon feared his life was already over. He’d shamed himself and his loving family and friends. He wasn’t sure if he’d survive the prison gangs, slowly earned some respect on the prison basketball court, received a steady flow of letters from hometown well wishers, including from a special girl, and most crucially, secured a job in the prison law library. Shon soon became the go-to guy for inmates seeking help. Then came a request to write a complex petition to the Supreme Court – an act of jailhouse lawyering that had never before met with success. By the time Shon walked out of Pekin Prison he’d pulled off a series of legal miracles, earned the undying gratitude of numerous inmates, won the woman of his dreams, and built a new life for himself far greater than anything he could have imagined.

Initially sentenced to life plus 70 years in Trenton State Prison, Isaac Wright, Jr. used the prison library to educate himself in the law and helped overturn the wrongful convictions of dozens of his fellow inmates before ultimately representing himself, proving his own innocence, and bringing down the powerful and corrupt men that had aligned against him. Becoming a paralegal with the prison's Inmate Legal Association, he appealed his case. Wright used every legal means at his disposal, eventually uncovering the smoking gun that unraveled the conspiracy perpetrated by law enforcement officials against him. Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson co-directed and had a small supporting role in this series now available on Hulu.

In 1992, a group of Yale law students began an effort to free 300 Haitian refugees held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay. The students took on the president of Yale and the U.S. government, and they won. After protracted litigation in federal court and the U.S. Supreme Court, the Haitians were discharged from Gitmo.

Part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, and part landmark legal case, The Third Degree is the true story of a young man’s abuse by the Washington police and an arduous, seven-year journey through the legal system that drew in Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John W. Davis, and J. Edgar Hoover. The ordeal culminated in a sweeping Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Louis Brandeis that set the stage for the Miranda warning many years later. The author argues that the importance of the case hinges not on the defendant’s guilt or innocence but on the imperative that a system that presumes one is innocent until proven guilty provides protections against coerced confessions.
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