The Pig Farmer's Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present

From the head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights comes a landmark study of the ways in which prejudice has shaped American justice from the Civil War era to the present. With an ear tuned to the social subtext of every judicial decision, Mary Frances Berry examines the stories told in more than a century's worth of state appellate court cases -- stories of seduction, rape, and murder, of contested paternity, property, and inheritance -- all of them dealing with racial and sexual relations. Together these stories form a vivid account of how the law has evolved -- or failed to evolve -- as society's attitudes have changed.

Ranging from a nineteenth-century Alabama case, in which a white woman was denied her divorce petition because an affair between a white man (her husband) and a black woman (his lover) was "of no consequence", to such recent, high-profile cases as the William Kennedy Smith and O.J. Simpson trials, the shocking, moving, ironic, and tragic stories in The Pig Farmer's Daughter each end in the laying down of law. And because the law perpetuates myths of race, gender, and class, they are stories that affect the lives of us all.