If the obscene material you’re distributing is so avant-garde that most readers can’t tell it’s actually obscene, did you commit a crime or not? This week, we’re getting into the trial of the scandalous literary magazine editors who brought the work of James Joyce to America.
Not all scam artists prey on suckers’ desire to get rich quick or cheat the system. Some of them prey on their marks’ better impulses, like their love for their pet dogs or their willingness to help a stranger in an emergency.
With options for getting rid of its convicts drying up, Britain started thinking about reforming both its prisons and the prisoners inside them. The intention behind these prison reforms was great. But attempts to create a better prison system involved wild philosophy experiments in real life, a lot of Bibles, a lot of time to think in silence, and… treadmills?
Is abortion legal in Japan? No, but also yes. Join us on a journey through history to learn about how modern abortion law developed in a legal system that didn’t treat fetuses as legal persons but did want to count them as future taxpayers.
Under Britain’s most notorious era of criminal law, you could be sentenced to death for everything from destroying a fishpond…
The law was out to take Emma Goldman down on a range of charges from distributing obscene material to assassination…
Something seemed a little less than ideal about governments and economies around the world in the late 1880s. One woman’s solution? Anarchy.
On one side, a crooked saloon owner with a side business in brothels and opium dens. On the other side, a moralistic tycoon with rail car full of beautiful vegetables. Which one of them did more damage to a frontier town in Montana?
Want to crown yourself the king of Germany? Want to conquer Europe because you have really strong opinions about public transit? Want to get rich quick selling fake government ID cards? With this one completely nonsense legal strategy, you too can claim the government of Germany isn’t real and join the ranks of some very iffy far-right extremists.
To crown the monarch of the United Kingdom, you need a 336-pound block of sandstone. But who really owns that big chunk of stone, and who was the thief who stole it from its rightful place?