War crimes.
War crime trials.

From events at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, to the recent trials of Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein, war crimes trials are an increasingly pervasive feature of the aftermath of conflict. In his new book, Law, War and Crime, Gerry Simpson explores the meaning and effect of such trials, and places them in their broader political and cultural contexts. The book traces the development of the war crimes field from its origins in the outlawing of piracy to its contemporary manifestation in the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Simpson argues that the field of war crimes is constituted by a number of tensions between, for example, politics and law, local justice and cosmopolitan reckoning, collective guilt and individual responsibility, and between the instinct that war, at worst, is an error and the conviction that war is a crime.

Law and anthropology.
Anthropology — Australia — History.
Aboriginal Australians — Land tenure — History.

This book examines the role of history in key Indigenous rights cases which occurred during the era of the Howard government, when Indigenous rights and the place of Aboriginal people in the national story were repudiated in a variety of government laws and policies. The book investigates how the courts have made use of historians as expert witnesses, and how the colonial past has been framed and understood by the courts. This is an important historical record of a unique period of litigation in Indigenous affairs in Australia

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United States. Supreme Court.
Judicial process — United States.
Appellate courts — United States.

This groundbreaking book analyzes the decisions made by the United States circuit courts over the past half century. These courts have a profound impact on the law—they issue many more decisions in many more areas of law than the Supreme Court. Cross demonstrates that while the courts’ judges are influenced by ideology and by the appointing president, legal requirements exercise a much stronger influence on their decisions. He also shows that these courts are independent of the other branches of government and free from undue influence of various parties. The book further introduces new research on the precedent-setting power of decisions.