Jodine Mayberry is a retired journalist. She was a legal writer and editor for West Publications, a division of Thomson Reuters, for 18 years.
Launched in March 1978, the FBI sting operation known as Abscam led to the conviction of a U.S. senator, six congressmen, three Philadelphia City Council members, and the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, for taking bribes from undercover agents pretending to the Arab sheiks. The FBI secretly filmed the transactions in hotel rooms in New York and Philadelphia, a yacht in Miami, and a mansion in ...
Carved out of Chester County in 1789 (with the remainder of that county lying to its southwest), Delaware County long served as a distinct but close neighbor to the City of Philadelphia. Linked to the Philadelphia port from the eighteenth century onward, the eastern part of the county, including Chester and its neighboring municipalities along ...
From its earliest days as an English colony, Pennsylvania needed lawyers to run the government, settle disputes, and keep the peace. As Philadelphia became a large city and important commercial, insurance, banking, and shipping center on the eve of the American Revolution, its lawyers were crucial to every civic endeavor, including the making of a new nation. With the dawning of the Industrial ...
Media, Pennsylvania, was built on farmland in the 1850s as the new county seat of Delaware County. The county, which was carved from Chester County in 1789, lies in the southeastern corner of the state along the Delaware River between Philadelphia and the state of Delaware. Located only 12 miles from Philadelphia, Media is an early example of a “planned community,” intended as both a ...
The term Philadelphia lawyer originated in the eighteenth century as a description of members of the Philadelphia bar, then widely considered the best trained in the American colonies and exceptionally skilled in the law and rhetoric. By the twentieth century the term had taken on a less flattering secondary meaning, to denote a clever attorney skilled in manipulating the law for his clients’ ...
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