Doug Linder

In 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American, bought a home for his family in a white neighborhood of Detroit. When a white crowd gathered around the house and violence broke out, one member of the crowd was killed. Police charged everyone in the Sweet home with premeditated murder. Explore Clarence Darrow's defense, and what the trial revealed about American society at that time.

Learn about Charles H. Houston, the African American lawyer who made it his life's work to challenge Jim Crow laws and who won a Supreme Court victory in the case of Gaines v. Missouri, paving the way for the Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Houston's work for the NAACP to end segregation led his successor, Thurgood Marshall, to say he was just carrying Houston's bags.

When the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) expelled scout leader James Dale because he way gay, Dale challenged the BSA's authority to use sexual orientation as a basis for exclusion. In a case pitting Dale's claimed right to be free from discrimination against the associational rights of the Scouts, the Supreme Court sided with the Boy Scouts. Examine the reasons for, and effects of, the ruling.

Desperate for an abortion, Norma McCorvey agreed (under the name "Jane Roe") to take the case to court, and ultimately the Supreme Court. As you learn about the famous decision that resulted, you'll also gain a better understanding of the many other ways in which American courts have intervened in personal decisions related to sterilization and birth control, as well as abortion.

Labor tensions were already at the boiling point in Chicago, when someone threw a bomb into a group of police officers. Although the bomb thrower was never found, eight defendants were tried by a jury handpicked by the bailiff, and seven were found guilty and sentenced to death for inciting violence. Explore the ways in which this trial became a key event in the history of free speech in America.

The citizens of the newly formed United States could not agree on the overall moral issue of slavery, but they were willing to take up its more narrow legal issues. Gain a greater understanding of the many ways in which the legal system supported the institution of slavery by examining the trials of two slaves: Anthony Burns and Celia (no last name).

Susan B. Anthony believed she was a citizen of the United States according to the Fourteenth Amendment and, as such, had the right to vote. But in 1872, the law was not on her side. So when she dropped her ballot into the box at the West End New Depot in Rochester, NY, on Election Day, she was arrested. Learn about the trial that brought nationwide attention to the issue of women's suffrage.

Does a city have the right to use eminent domain to take private property and sell it for private development if the city believes that development will improve the city's economy? Learn how Susette Kelo's refusal to sell her "little pink house" in New London, CT, led to a Supreme Court case addressing what she described to Congress as "eminent domain abuse," and why she lost the case.

Do we Americans have the freedom to isolate ourselves, express views considered racist and hateful by the majority, and stockpile legally purchased weapons? Do we have the liberty to sell a sawed-off shotgun? Explore the complex story and resultant trial that started with Randy and Vicki Weaver wanting to separate themselves from mainstream society, and ended with three dead at Ruby Ridge.

In 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring that all Japanese Americans move to "relocation camps" as a matter of national security. Fred Korematsu refused, was arrested for violating an "exclusion order," and convicted. Learn how Korematsu carried his fight against what he thought was an "un-American" law all the way to the Supreme Court.