It’s a storyline straight out of a John Grisham novel. For 15 years and running, two Pittsburgh lawyers fight to bring justice to a small coal mine owner driven into bankruptcy by Don Blankenship, the most powerful coal baron in American history. The courtroom battle starts in a small courtroom in West Virginia, reaches the U.S. Supreme Court and then lands in neighboring Virginia courts, where it continues today.

“Gideon’s Army,” a film by Dawn Porter which portrays the lives of three young public defenders working in the south, opens this year’s Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham on April 4, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.

One day last spring, as the wave of protest movements swept across the Middle East into Bahrain and troops arrived to restore order, the phone rang in John Knight’s office. The streets were unsettled, the markets were volatile, and Knight, who is chief operating officer for Mumtalakat Holding Company, the investment arm for the Kingdom of Bahrain, was engaged in his first encounter with martial law. Any number of emergencies could have been waiting on the other line.

Ann Majestic arrived at the National Press Club in Washington with little time to spare. “How was lunch?” the Wake County School Board attorney asked the audience. “We weren’t allowed to leave North Carolina until we could bring the weather, so we arrived just in time with lots of weather.” She was there on a snowy Thursday to speak about public school choice and integration – along with New York Times reporter Steven Holmes, American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman and Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg, whose new book, All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public School Choice, grounded the forum.

Chris Dusseault’s Blackberry lit up just as soon as he and his wife had settled in at their table in a Nantucket restaurant on an August 2010 evening. He knew the simple message — “Perry, 09-2292, release set for tomorrow” — signaled an interruption to their long-delayed holiday.

After spending the past several years as the founding executive director of the NC Institute for Constitutional Law, former Supreme Court Justice Robert Orr is returning to private practice, joining Raleigh’s Poyner Spurill.

It’s been twenty years since Tracy Kidder sat at a desk in Room 205 of the Kelly School, Holyoke, Mass., witness to a year in the life of Christine Zajac’s fifth grade.Yet the class Kidder portrayed in “Among Schoolchildren” – filled with immigrant children, most free lunch eligible, testing far below average and battered by home lives that were transient at best and abusive at worst – could just as easily exist today.