This book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices.

Laced with atmospheric poetry and literature and set in the heart of Denver's black community, this gripping crime novel pits three characters in a race against time to thwart a gross miscarriage of justice—and a crooked detective who wreaks havoc…with deadly consequences. What happens to a deferred dream—especially when an innocent man's life hangs in the balance? Langston Brown is running out of time and options for clearing his name and escaping death row. Wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Mother's Day Massacre, he prepares to face his death. His final hope for salvation lies with his daughter, Liza, an artist who dreamed of a life of music and song but left the prestigious Juilliard School to pursue a law degree with the intention of clearing her father's name. Just as she nears success, it's announced that Langston will be put to death in thirty days. In a desperate bid to find freedom for her father, Liza enlists the help of Eli Stone, a jazz club owner she met at the classic Five Points venue, The Roz. Devastated by the tragic loss of his wife, Eli is trying to find solace by reviving the club…while also wrestling with the longing to join her in death. Everyone has a dream that might come true—but as the dark shadows of the past converge, could Langston, Eli, and Liza be facing a danger that could shatter those dreams forever?

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.

Pursuing the Horizon offers a collection of essays and courtroom stories from an activist, death penalty lawyer, and Washington, D.C. judge struggling to seek justice in the courtroom, in the fields where migrant farmworkers toil and in the rice paddies of Vietnam. The book explores justice in all its forms from freedom for beaten migrant farmworkers in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan, to life itself in a death row plea for mercy before Governor George Wallace of Alabama only to witness the client killed in a botched execution in the electric chair that shocked the world. Justice from the other side of the bench looks at the challenge for a judge wrestling with the age-old quandary of whether the ends justify the means when strictly following the law would result in a miscarriage of justice. The author must make the wrenching decision as to whether to terminate life support to allow a woman die with dignity when family members have different views of the right to live and right to die. The elusive search for justice follows the judge to a high profile murder trial for the killing of a prominent Georgetown writer by her fabulist husband posing as an Iraqi general all the while conning a Vice President, Supreme Court justice and elite journalists that led to the Hollywood movie Georgetown, starring Christoph Waltz and Vanessa Redgrave. Finally, the journey takes the author to Vietnam where he seeks to pay homage and find reconciliation at the site where his brother was killed in the war. Pursuing the Horizon allows the reader to sample some of the most horrifying, perplexing, and important issues in life and the law, offering the general public, via suspenseful and riveting stories, a rare lens into the daily life and minds of those seeking to achieve justice and those who must live, or sometimes die, with the consequences of their efforts. Justice, like the horizon, always seems to be beyond our grasp. But that can never mean that we should stop pursuing it. This book is about the author's search for justice along with dedicated judges, lawyers, jurors, those accused of crime, those who are the victims of crime, police, social workers, nurses, mental health workers, and the public at large.

This is a full-length study of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars law and literature inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture.