When you’re unhappy about the price of wheat, there’s only one solution: Send a telegraph to the Australian government declaring…
When an Englishman with the rare ability to speak Mandarin Chinese got into a dispute with a corrupt local official…
A negotiation over fishing rights took an unexpected turn when a Lithuanian fisherman jumped onto an American Coast Guard ship…
In a country where gay sex is illegal, is a magazine for gay people a publication for criminals? Is the…
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…