Stephen Colbert's super PAC, Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow has raised more than $1 million since getting a green-light from the Federal Election Commission last June. Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow has managed to find hilarity in the minutiae of campaign finance — and revealed its inner workings to millions of Americans. But none of this would've been possible without Trevor Potter, Colbert’s attorney and the former FEC Commissioner.

Stephen Glass is now a 39-year-old law clerk at a firm in Beverly Hills, California. But more than decade ago, he was a young reporter on the rise. Glass's career in journalism came to an abrupt halt after it was discovered that over 40 of his articles — written for The New Republic, Harpers, Rolling Stone and other well-regarded magazines — were largely fabricated. Glass made up quotes, invented sources, and backed up his work with elaborate fake notes, fake websites, phony email addresses, phone numbers, and voicemail messages. 

In a small town in Texas, two young men knock on the door of a woman’s house as she's making cookies. They ask to use her phone. But as her back is turned, they kill her and then two other innocent bystanders all so they can enjoy a brief joyride in her car. In the end, one murderer is sentenced to life in prison. The other is given the death penalty.

Author John Grisham has leveraged his career by doing what few in the legal profession can. He has made subjects usually relegated to the law school classroom — topics like torts and case law — into fascinating, suspenseful literature. While he is best known as a bestselling author, John Grisham has also become an advocate for criminal justice reform. He serves on the board of the Innocence Project, a public policy organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully-convicted.

Twenty years ago the country watched a political drama unfold onscreen. Clarence Thomas, then a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was nominated to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush in July of 1991. He went through the usual battery of Senate questioning in September. His confirmation seemed controversial but likely, until a young law professor named Anita Hill changed him with sexual harassment. The Hill-Thomas hearings riveted the nation.

After four years in prison, Amanda Knox walked free on Monday. The 24-year-old American woman, and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher in 2009. Sollecito's conviction was also overturned by an Italian appeals court in Perugia. The story of sex, drug-using, exchange students, and murder became a media sensation around the world. The prosecution's case against Knox was derided as based on circumstantial evidence doubted by independent experts.

Partisan politics, brinkmanship, periodic threats to shutdown the government over seemingly routine matters — it is easy to see why so many Americans have grown disillusioned with the political system. "If there's too much cynicism, then the Constitution won't work, it can't," Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer tells The Takeaway. A Clinton appointee, who has spent 15 years on the Supreme Court, Breyer warns that a jaded, disfranchised electorate is perilous to a functioning democracy in the U.S. under the Constitution.

Conrad Black was once one of the most powerful men in the publishing business. He bought London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1985 and eventually owned hundreds of newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada. But all that changed in 2007, when a U.S. Circuit Court convicted Black of fraud and obstruction of justice. He was released from prison last year, midway through his six-and-a-half year sentence, after an appellate court dropped two charges against him. Then in June of this year, a Chicago court upheld two other charges of defrauding investors against Black, ordering him to return to prison for a 13-month sentence, which he began yesterday.

Eugenics laws allowed more than thirty states to sterilize people "undeemed to breed" for nearly a century. While it is irrevocably associated with the super-race fetish and ethnic cleansing of Nazi Germany, the so-called science of eugenics is actually an American distortion of medical science. Much of the murky original research and theories of how societies might take control of their own gene pools to increase the numbers of intelligent people—and eliminate those deemed feeble-minded—took place on Long Island, at the same laborotory where DNA was first identified.

Several of the nearly 3,000 of the living victims of forced sterilization in North Carolina will testify before a commission today. Until 1974, North Carolina had one of the most aggressive eugenics movements in the country, sterilizing an estimated 7,600 people who were deemed "socially or intellectually unfit" to have children.

In just a few days, a new law goes into effect in France, banning any veils that cover the face. Effectively a "burqa ban," the law was passed last fall by the French senate with a vote of 246 to 1. But it’s not just the French senate that’s in favor of the ban. The Pew Global Attitudes Project found in a survey last year that only one in four French people are opposed to the ban.

Another judge has struck down the Obama administration’s sweeping health care reform law. So far two federal judges have ruled in favor of the law’s legality, while two have ruled it unconstitutional. Twenty-six states' attorneys general brought this latest lawsuit and it’s unclear how the ruling will be interpreted in each of them. This time Judge Rodger Vinson, of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Florida ruled that the mandate to buy health insurance was so intertwined with the rest of the law that the entire act was unconstitutional.

In June 1982, John Hinckley, Jr. – President Reagan’s would-be assassin – was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The announcement sparked widespread public criticism, as many believed that the verdict, for all practical purposes, exonerated the man who tried to kill the president. Nearly thirty years later, it seems likely that Jared Loughner, the man charged with attempted assassination and murder after last weekend’s deadly shooting spree in Tucson, will also plead insanity in his case.

Julian Assange turned himself over to police in London on Tuesday, bringing to a close a period of speculation about how and whether the WikiLeaks founder would wind up in custody. Assange currently faces extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for discussion with the police on alleged sex crimes. His problems may not end at the Swedish border, however.

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, will soon stand before the nation’s top court to argue for their constitutional right to protest outside soldiers’ funerals. In their view, American deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment for the country’s acceptance of homosexuality.

Albert Snyder is the plaintiff in the case; his son, U.S. Marine Matthew Snyder, was killed in Iraq in 2006. The WBC went to Snyder's funeral in Maryland, holding signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and other fiery epithets. Snyder fought the group and won in a lower court, arguing the church deliberately sought to inflict emotional distress, but that decision was overturned at a higher court. The Supreme Court has traditionally been very reluctant to impose limits on our freedom of speech, even offensive speech: will this case qualify?

The Supreme Court begins a new term today, facing a list of cases with several dominant themes: personal privacy, the rights of corporations, and just how far the far-flung boundaries of First Amendment protection extend when offensive speech is involved. The court has three female justices for the first time in its history, although newly-appointed Justice Elena Kagan will need to recuse herself from several cases she had pursued or submitted in her former role as Solicitor General.

For years, people have claimed a racial bias in our country’s death penalty system, based on the statistics of who winds up on death row. But, now, a law in North Carolina aims to do something to address such bias when it comes to capital prosecution.

When an unmarried woman places her child up for adoption, how much say should the reputed father — or putative father, as they’re referred to legally — have?

Courts across the country have been grappling with this question. In Ohio, a man has been fighting to stop the finalization of his child’s adoption for more than a year. Several men in states across the country have been trying to stop the adoptions of their children in Utah, which is widely regarded as the most complicated state for putative fathers who want to claim parental rights. And two other cases have just been settled in Ohio, which gave the putative fathers more leeway than previously existed to stop adoptions.

In Tehran, a private organization has introduced a catalog of appropriate haircuts for men, the first such code since the Islamic Revolutions of 1979. The list, presented by the Veil and Modesty Festival, has not been officially sanctioned by the Ministry of Culture, though they say approval is "pending."

The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the scope of a law that has put people like former Enron Chief Jeffrey Skilling behind bars. The law, known as the "honest-services law," makes it illegal to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."  In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the law’s language was too broad. The decision sends Skilling's case back to the lower courts and calls into question other recent convictions under the same law, including the charges against Conrad M. Black, the newspaper executive convicted of defrauding his media company, Hollinger International, as well as Joseph Bruno, one of the most prominent politicians in New York.

Closing arguments are scheduled for today in a federal trial that will address the constitutionality of Proposition 8 - the controversial amendment to California's constitution that reinstated a ban on gay marriage in the state in 2008, after it had been legal for some months.