Law
Showing 1–32 of 67 results
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The Bail Trap
A Scandal at the Heart of American Justice$27.99From the renowned founder of The Bail Project, an eye-opening book about why we allow money to play any role in the administration of justice
Over 90 percent of people held in jail pretrial because they cannot pay cash bail will plead guilty, whether they committed a crime or not. Cash bail not only creates a two-tier system of justice— one for those with money and one for those without—it also drives racial disparities in the criminal justice system and is responsible for almost all net jail growth in America over the past two decades. There is perhaps no other component of America’s justice system that is so broken, yet completely integral to the current operation of our courts, as bail.
With engaging and accessible prose, Robin Steinberg, founder and CEO of The Bail Project, and her colleague Camilo Ramirez tell the shocking true stories of people jailed by poverty while also detailing:
- the history of bail, from its inception in medieval England, as an incentive for people to return to court, to modern America where it is a “mechanism for detention”
- the roles lawyers, judges, and legislators have in the legal system and how and why they have become complicit in excessive bail
- how the current bail system undermines the promise of a fair and just system and the U.S. Constitution
- effective alternatives to cash bail
For fans of The Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer and James Kilgore’s Understanding Mass Incarceration, Steinberg, whose previous book was called “powerfully insightful reading” by Kirkus Reviews, and Ramirez provide an unprecedented look at America’s cash bail system and inspire us to imagine a better, fairer way forward.
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The Constitution Cannot Save Us
$31.99A radical argument by the leading constitutional scholar that American constitutional law lacks the resources to address our current problems, and risks making them worse
Constitutional theorists on the Right and the Left are united in the belief that constitutional law and review by the Supreme Court are crucial to the success of the American experiment. Both sides believe that, on issues ranging from affirmative action, reproductive freedom, and gun control, to economic regulation, regulation of speech, and the role of religion in American society, popular democracy is just too dangerous to go unchecked.
In a paradigm-shifting argument sure to change the debate about the rule of law in the age of Trump, Louis Michael Seidman argues that there is no approach to constitutionalism that can withstand the recent collapse of a progressive political coalition and an administration that has embraced a malignant populism. Seidman, called “one of our greatest living constitutional scholars” by Georgetown University Law professor Rosa Brooks, understands that a natural reaction to the current danger is to shore up the foundations of constitutional theory, uniting in the defense of “the rule of law.” But he sees this response as gravely mistaken and bound to fail. As he writes in the introduction, “no one should be fooled into thinking that a legal strategy will stop the broad thrust of the Trump revolution.”
Instead, he charts a different way forward. If both sides ended their dogmatic insistence that divisive social issues can be definitively settled by a piece of aging parchment, we might ease political tensions and begin a respectful and productive debate about the deep grievances that are tearing the country apart.
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Challenging Cases
Judges Tell the Stories of High-Profile and Other Tough Cases$29.99Following on the success of Tough Cases, called “A law buff’s dream” by headbutler.com, this companion volume collects judges’ firsthand stories of deciding cases when the world is watching
Most cases that judges decide garner little public attention. But occasionally, a case is tried both in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion. In Challenging Cases, some of the country’s leading jurists talk about the most difficult cases they’ve handled—ones where the eyes of the world were upon them.
Whether the defendant was a beloved major league baseball player, a movie star, or a well-known sex-offender, or whether the topic addressed an especially contentious aspect of the culture wars, these cases played out before millions of on-lookers, adding a whole new dimension to what is already a Solomonic responsibility.
In their previous book, Tough Cases, called “an unprecedented view from the bench” by legal commentator Greta van Susteren, and “a genuine revelation” by Justin Driver in The Washington Post, Judges Canan, Mize, and Weisberg made us privy to the thought processes of judges making some of their hardest legal decisions. In Challenging Cases, over a dozen judges from courts in DC, Texas, Seattle, Michigan, Maine, Buffalo, Virginia, and more speak to the added challenge of trials involving high-profile defendants. Cases include:
- the perjury trial of Roger Clemens
- the sentencing of January 6th rioters
- the case of Dr. Larry Nassar, accused of the sexual abuse of hundreds of female athletes
- the Kosovo international war crimes trial
- the Johnny Depp trial
Providing the fodder for a whole new season of Law and Order, Challenging Cases is for every actual and armchair legal beagle in the country.
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Defending My Enemy
Skokie and the Legacy of Free Speech in America$17.99 – $49.00With a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by Nadine Strossen
A new edition of the most important free speech book of the past half-century, with a new essay by the author on some of the top First Amendment controversies of today “If Aryeh Neier had done nothing else in his absolutely towering human rights, civil liberties career other than write Defending My Enemy, that still would have made him a hero and a giant.” —Nadine Strossen, former president, American Civil Liberties UnionWhen Nazis wanted to express their right to free speech in 1977 by marching through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors—Aryeh Neier, then the national director of the ACLU and himself a Holocaust survivor, came to the Nazis’ defense. Explaining what many saw as a despicable bridge too far for the First Amendment, Neier spelled out his thoughts about free speech in his 1979 book Defending My Enemy.
Nearly fifty years later, Neier revisits the topic of free speech in a volume that includes his original essay along with a new piece addressing present-day First Amendment battles, including the Charlottesville march, book bans, the heckler’s veto, attacks on free speech on college campuses, and the threat to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision in The New York Times v. Sullivan.
Including a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by longtime free speech champion Nadine Strossen, Defending My Enemy offers razor-sharp analysis from the man Muck Rack describes as having “a glittering civil liberties résumé.”
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Copaganda
How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News$31.99From a prizewinning civil rights lawyer comes a powerful warning about how the media manipulates public perception, fueling fear and inequality, while distracting us from what truly matters
“Alec Karakatsanis exposes our criminal injustice system for what it is: a bureaucracy of punishment, propped up by a biased media machine that feeds mass incarceration. After Copaganda, you’ll never read the news the same way again.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
In this groundbreaking expose, essential for understanding the rising authoritarian mindset, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of “Copaganda.” He defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy.
For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda documents how modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people’s lives—things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.
These false narratives in turn fuel surveillance, punishment, inequality, injustice, and mass incarceration. Copaganda is often hidden in plain sight, such as:
- When your local TV station obsessively focuses on shoplifting by poor people while ignoring crimes of wage theft, tax evasion, and environmental pollution
- When you hear on your daily podcast that there is a “shortage” of prison guards rather than too many people in prison
- When your newspaper quotes an “expert” saying that more money for police and prisons is the answer to violence despite scientific evidence to the contrary
Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on the criminal legal system, Karakatsanis brings his sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to drastically alter the way we consume information, while offering a hopeful path forward. One towards a healed humanity—and media system—with a vested interest in public safety and equality.
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Bad Law
Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America$26.99In this New York Times bestseller, Elie Mystal offers a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today—an urgent yet hopeful read for our current political climate
“Mystal is a grassroots legal superhero, and his superpower is the ability to explain to the masses in clear language the all-too-human forces at play behind the making of our laws.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop
In Bad Law, the New York Times bestselling author of Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution reimagines what our legal system, and society at large, could look like if we could move past legislation plagued by racism, misogyny, and corruption. Through accessible yet detailed prose and trenchant wit, Mystal argues that these egregiously awful laws—his “Bill of Wrongs”—continue to cause systematic and individual harm and should be repealed completely.
By exposing the flawed foundations of the rules we live by, and through biting humor and insight, Bad Law offers a crisp, pertinent take on:
- abortion and the Hyde Amendment, and the role federal funding, or lack thereof, has played in depriving women of necessary health and reproductive care
- immigration and illegal reentry, and the illusions that have been sold to us regarding immigration policy, reform, and whiteness at large
- voter registration laws, and how the right to vote has become a moral issue, and ironically, antidemocratic
- gun control and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and the extreme yet obvious dangers of granting immunity to gun manufacturers
But, as the man Samantha Bee calls “irrepressible and righteously indignant” and Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion calls “the funniest lawyer in America,” points out, these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a fierce, funny, and wholly original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.
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Usual Cruelty
The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System$17.99 – $30.00A “searing, searching, and eloquent” (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration—now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer
“Usual Cruelty cuts to the core of what is critical to understand about our legal system, and about ourselves.”
—Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLUUsual Cruelty is a radical reconsideration of the American “injustice system” by someone who is actively—and successfully—challenging it. Hailed as a “fiery indictment” (Publishers Weekly) as well as a “compelling and damning argument” (Slate), Usual Cruelty offers a paradigm-shifting look at our legal system and the central role lawyers play in the “punishment bureaucracy.” “Passionately argued” (The New Yorker), the book explores the viciousness of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations. Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis’s reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights leaders of our time.
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Policing White Supremacy
The Enemy Within$29.99A former FBI agent’s urgent call for law enforcement to prioritize far-right violence and end tolerance for police racism
In Policing White Supremacy, former FBI agent Mike German, who worked undercover in white supremacist and militia groups, issues a wake-up call about law enforcement’s dangerously lax approach to far-right violence.
Despite over a hundred deadly acts by far-right militants since the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the far right’s attempts to obstruct transfer of power to a duly elected president on January 6, the FBI continues to deprioritize investigations into white supremacist violence, instead targeting marginalized groups such as environmentalists and Black Lives Matter. In 2005, for example, the FBI labeled eco-terrorists as the top domestic threat, despite not a single fatal attack in the United States.
Noting that the FBI does not even compile accurate national data on white supremacist violence, German also exposes the continuing tolerance of overt racism in law enforcement, and police membership in white supremacist organizations. The threat these officers pose became clear when at least twenty-eight current and former law enforcement officials were alleged to have participated in the 2021 Capitol breach.
With chapters on “The Rise of the Proud Boys,” “A New Approach to Policing Hate Crimes,” and “Policing the Police,” Policing White Supremacy shows how the lack of transparency and accountability in federal, state, and local law enforcement has eroded public trust and undermined democracy. “Law Enforcement’s Role in Resisting White Supremacy” points the way forward to a future where far-right violence is recognized and addressed as the true threat it presents to our country.
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A Second Chance
A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It$27.99A sitting federal judge’s lively and provocative recounting of six cases, to make the argument for revisiting overly punitive sentences
Murderous mafia capos. The police officer who brutalized Abner Louima. A purveyor of child pornography. These are some of the defendants to have come before U.S. District Court Judge Frederic Block to ask for reductions in their prison sentences. All of them have been found guilty and have already served decades in prison, but under the 2018 First Step Act they are entitled to petition for reconsideration and release.
In a rare glimpse behind the bench, Judge Block recounts the cases of six incarcerated people who have done heinous things but have nevertheless petitioned him for their release. He then explains the criteria the First Step Act has spelled out for his consideration. And, in a novel twist, he asks the reader, “What would you do?”
Judge Block puts us out of our suspense in a third section of the book where he tells us what he did do in each case and why, as he weighs each compassionate release request, evaluating issues ranging from “the trial tax,” to sentencing disparities, to judicial incompetence. Finally, Judge Block makes the compelling case that the First Step Act should be extended to state court judges, since state prisons house about 90 percent of those incarcerated. In a book that could be the basis for a new season of Law & Order, Judge Block challenges our ideas about punishment and justice.
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The Miracle of the Black Leg
Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law$29.99Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist—aka the Mad Law Professor—tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more
Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.
With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers.
At the heart of “Wrongful Birth” is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child “comes out Black”; “Bodies in Law” explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And “Hot Cheeto Girl” examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny.
In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.
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Unjust Debts
How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal$27.99Named one of the Best Summer Books in Economics by the Financial Times
A groundbreaking look at the hidden role of bankruptcy in perpetuating inequality in America, from an expert in the field“Unjust Debts throws open the doors and windows to the bankruptcy system so readers can see for themselves how this law works and doesn’t work for the real people it so profoundly affects.”
—Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick and Raising LazarusBankruptcy is the busiest federal court in America. In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many—a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially.
In this brilliant and paradigm-shifting book, legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby shows how bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful individuals, corporations, and governments, contributing in unseen and poorly understood ways to race, gender, and class inequality in America. When cities go bankrupt, for example, police unions enjoy added leverage while police brutality victims are denied a seat at the negotiating table; the system is more forgiving of civil rights abuses than of the parking tickets disproportionately distributed in African American neighborhoods. Across a broad range of crucial issues, Unjust Debts reveals the hidden mechanisms by which bankruptcy impacts everything from sexual harassment to health care, police violence to employment discrimination, and the opioid crisis to gun violence.
In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s groundbreaking Evicted, Unjust Debts is a riveting and original work of accessible scholarship with huge implications for ordinary people and will set the terms of debate for this vital subject.
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When Innocence Is Not Enough
Hidden Evidence and the Failed Promise of the Brady Rule$28.99Finalist, Colorado Book Award
A gripping work of narrative nonfiction, told across time, that exposes what’s at stake when prosecutors conceal evidence—and what we can do about it
The Brady rule was meant to transform the U.S. justice system. In soaring language, the Supreme Court decreed in 1963 that prosecutors must share favorable evidence with the defense—part of a suite of decisions of that reform-minded era designed to promote fairness for those accused of crimes. But reality intervened. The opinion faced many challenges, ranging from poor legal reasoning and shaky precedent to its clashes with the very foundations of the American criminal legal system and some of its most powerful enforcers: prosecutors.
In this beautifully wrought work of narrative nonfiction, Thomas L. Dybdahl illustrates the promise and shortcomings of the Brady rule through deft storytelling and attention to crucial cases, including the infamous 1984 murder of Catherine Fuller in Washington, DC. This case led to eight young Black men being sent to prison for life after the prosecutor, afraid of losing the biggest case of his career, hid information that would have proven their innocence.
With a seasoned defense lawyer’s unsparing eye for detail, Thomas L. Dybdahl chronicles the evolution of the Brady rule—from its unexpected birth to the series of legal decisions that left it defanged and ineffective. Yet Dybdahl shows us a path forward by highlighting promising reform efforts across the country that offer a blueprint for a legislative revival of Brady’s true spirit.
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Change from Within
Reimagining the 21st-Century Prosecutor$27.99A new breed of reform-minded prosecutors tells their stories about the challenges and successes of making change from inside the system
Growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Kim Foxx never anticipated that she would become the chief prosecutor in the country’s second-biggest county. When Chesa Boudin was a baby, his parents were arrested and incarcerated. Visiting them in prison for decades helped shape his convictions about what justice does—and doesn’t—look like in the United States. Now, along with eleven other reform-minded prosecutors voters put in office throughout the country, they reflect on the task they set for themselves: making change from within.
Using the power of their office, which has traditionally fueled mass incarceration and harsh punishments, this new breed of elected prosecutors has joined the movement to shake up the justice system. In Change from Within, these visionaries describe their journeys to office, what they are doing to change “business as usual,” the pushback they’ve experienced, and their thoughts on reforms that are possible working from the inside.
Published in partnership with Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP), drawing from interviews conducted by FJP executive director Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor, this unprecedented book includes intensely personal first-person profiles of thirteen transformative DAs. Each story is accompanied by an image inspired by the prosecutor and created by a formerly incarcerated artist.
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Unreasonable
Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment$27.99How the Supreme Court’s decision to treat unreasonable policing as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment has shortened the distance between life and death for Black people
The summer of 2020 will be remembered as an unprecedented, watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality. Published on the second anniversary of the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Unreasonable is a groundbreaking investigation of the role that the law—and the U.S. Constitution—play in the epidemic of police violence against Black people.
In this crucially timely book, celebrated legal scholar Devon W. Carbado explains how the Fourth Amendment became ground zero for regulating police conduct—more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection and due process. Fourth Amendment law determines when and how the police can make arrests, and it determines the precarious line between stopping Black people and killing Black people.
A leading light in the critical race studies movement, Carbado looks at how that text, in the last four decades, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect police officers, not African Americans; how it sanctions search and seizure as well as profiling; and how it has become, ultimately, an amendment of life and death.
Accessible, radical, and essential reading, Unreasonable sheds light on a rarely understood dimension of today’s most pressing issue.
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Allow Me to Retort
A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution$18.99 – $26.99Finalist, ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books
The New York Times bestseller that has cemented Elie Mystal’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most acerbic legal minds
“After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . .” —Michael Harriot, The RootAllow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.
Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.
You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.
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From Parchment to Dust
The Case for Constitutional Skepticism$27.99The prominent constitutional law scholar’s fascinating (and yes, mind-boggling) argument that we don’t need the Constitution after all
For some, to oppose the Constitution is to oppose the American experiment itself. But leading constitutional scholar Louis Michael Seidman argues that our founding document has long passed its “sell-by” date. It might sound crazy, but Seidman’s arguments are both powerful and, well, convincing.
As Seidman shows, constitutional skepticism and disobedience have been present from the beginning of American history, even worming their way into the Federalist Papers. And, as Seidman also points out, no one alive today has agreed to be bound by these rules.
In From Parchment to Dust, Seidman offers a brief history of the phenomenon of constitutional skepticism and then proceeds to a masterful takedown of our most cherished, constitutionally enshrined institutions and beliefs, from the Supreme Court (“an arrogant elite in robes”), to the very concepts of civil rights, due process, and equal protection—all of which he argues are just pretenses for preserving a fundamentally rigged and inequitable status quo.
Rather than rely on the specific wording of a flawed and outdated document, rife with “Madison’s mistakes,” Seidman proposes instead a version that better reflects our shared values, and leaves it to people currently alive to determine how these values will play out in contemporary society.
From Parchment to Dust is a short, sharp, and iconoclastic book questioning the value (and ultimately the hypocrisy) of embracing the Constitution—which, after all, was written more than 230 years ago—as our moral and political lodestar.
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The People’s Constitution
200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union$45.00The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it more democratic
Who wrote the Constitution? That’s obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in 1787. But much of the Constitution was actually written later, in a series of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The real history of the Constitution is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding document amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a story of how We the People have improved our government’s structure and expanded the scope of our democracy during eras of transformational social change.
The People’s Constitution is an elegant, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy.
From the addition of the Bill of Rights, a promise made to save the Constitution from near certain defeat, to the post–Civil War battle over the Fourteenth Amendment, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Amendment a century in the making, The People’s Constitution is the first book of its kind: a vital guide to America’s national charter, and an alternative history of the continuing struggle to realize the Framers’ promise of a more perfect union.
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Carving Out a Humanity
Race, Rights, and Redemption$29.99Leading law professors weigh in on key issues in race and the law—collected in honor of one of the originators of critical race theory, Derrick Bell
When Derrick Bell, one of the originators of critical race theory, turned sixty-five, his wife set up a lecture series of the leading critical race theorists, many of them Bell’s former students. Now, these lectures, given over the course of twenty-five years, are collected for the first time in Carving Out a Humanity, a volume that Library Journal calls “potent” and Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, says “powerfully acknowledge[s] the persistence of structural racism.”
“To what extent does equal protection protect?” asks Ian Haney López in a penetrating analysis of the gaps that remain in our civil rights legal codes. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, describes the hypersegregation of our cities and the limits of the law’s ability to change deep-seated attitudes about race. Patricia J. Williams explores the legacy of slavery in the law’s current constructions of sanity. Anita Allen discusses competing privacy and accountability interests in the lives of African American celebrities. Chuck Lawrence interrogates the judicial backlash against affirmative action. And Michelle Alexander describes what caused her to break ranks with the civil rights community and take up the cause of those our legal system has labeled unworthy.
Carving Out a Humanity gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium. According to Library Journal, “Scholars and lay readers alike will be enlightened and spurred to thought and discussion.”
Contributors:
Charles Ogletree
Charles Lawrence
Patricia J. Williams
Richard Delgado
Lani Guinier
Anita Allen
Mari Matsuda
Cheryl L. Harris
Kendall Thomas
Derrick Bell
John Calmore
Robert A. Williams
Paul Butler
Emma Coleman Jordan
Devon W. Carbado
Ian Haney Lopez
Annette Gordon-Reed
William Carter Jr.
Stephen Bright
Sherrilyn Ifill
Michelle Alexander
Theodore M. Shaw
Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Kenneth W. Mack -
Democracy, If We Can Keep It
The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America$29.99Published to coincide with the ACLU’s centennial, a major new book by the nationally celebrated journalist and bestselling author
For a century, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought to keep Americans in touch with the founding values of the Constitution. As its centennial approached, the organization invited Ellis Cose to become its first ever writer-in-residence, with complete editorial independence.
The result is Cose’s groundbreaking Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU’s 100-Year Fight for Rights in America, the most authoritative account ever of America’s premier defender of civil liberties. A vivid work of history and journalism, Democracy, If We Can Keep It is not just the definitive story of the ACLU but also an essential account of America’s rediscovery of rights it had granted but long denied. Cose’s narrative begins with World War I and brings us to today, chronicling the ACLU’s role through the horrors of 9/11, the saga of Edward Snowden, and the phenomenon of Donald Trump.
A chronicle of America’s most difficult ethical quandaries from the Red Scare, the Scottsboro Boys’ trials, Japanese American internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam, Democracy, If We Can Keep It weaves these accounts into a deeper story of American freedom—one that is profoundly relevant to our present moment.
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When at Times the Mob Is Swayed
A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic$25.99 – $33.00From a leading constitutional lawyer who has sued every president since LBJ, a masterful explication of the true “pillars of our democracy”
On November 9, 2016—and again on January 6, 2021—many Americans feared that our democracy was on the verge of collapse. But is it? In an erudite and brilliant evaluation of the current state of our government, noted constitutional scholar Burt Neuborne administers a stress test to democracy and concludes that our unprecedented sets of constitutional protections, all endorsed by both major parties, stand between us and an authoritarian federal regime: namely the division of powers between the three branches, the rights reserved to the states, and the Bill of Rights.
Neuborne parses the genius of our constitutional system and the ways its built-in resilience will ultimately survive current attempts to dismantle it. While many important issue areas—women’s right to choose, LGBTQ rights, separation of church and state—risk erosion, Neuborne argues that the Constitution’s inherent defense mechanisms can buy us time. But only an active citizenry will enable us to defend our cherished rights and protections, fulfilling Ben Franklin’s charge to keep our republic.
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Raising the Bar
Diversifying Big Law$22.99A first-of-its-kind book of honest reflections, straight talk, and essential advice about life at big law firms for people of color
What do young people of color aspiring to careers in the law need to know about life at big law firms? What do law schools need to do to prepare them? What do the firms themselves need to do to attract, retain, and promote them?
In Raising the Bar, four partners of color from leading law firms engage in a no-holds-barred conversation about what it takes to make it in big law using their own journeys to the top to discuss how law firms can do a better job of attracting and holding on to a more diverse set of young attorneys.
They also offer advice to the attorneys themselves on how to succeed in a culture that has long excluded them, including finding mentors among those who don’t look like you, building a portable toolkit of skills, establishing key connections outside the firm, and staying “true to you,” even as young associates of color navigate the foreign terrain of insular firm culture.
The book also includes a section of concrete advice from diversity coordinators at several top law firms.
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Until We Reckon
Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair$18.99 – $38.00The award-winning “radically original” (The Atlantic) restorative justice leader, whose work the Washington Post has called “totally sensible and totally revolutionary,” grapples with the problem of violent crime in the movement for prison abolition
A National Book Foundation Literature for Justice honoree
A Kirkus “Best Book of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia”
Winner of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice Journalism Award
Finalist for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice
In a book Democracy Now! calls a “complete overhaul of the way we’ve been taught to think about crime, punishment, and justice,” Danielle Sered, the executive director of Common Justice and renowned expert on violence, offers pragmatic solutions that take the place of prison, meeting the needs of survivors and creating pathways for people who have committed violence to repair harm. Critically, Sered argues that reckoning is owed not only on the part of individuals who have caused violence, but also by our nation for its overreliance on incarceration to produce safety—at a great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy.
Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers has been almost entirely on nonviolent and drug offenses. Called “innovative” and “truly remarkable” by The Atlantic and “a top-notch entry into the burgeoning incarceration debate” by Kirkus Reviews, Sered’s Until We Reckon argues with searing force and clarity that our communities are safer the less we rely on prisons and jails as a solution for wrongdoing.
Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of survivors of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt—none of which happens in the context of a criminal trial or a prison sentence.
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Tough Cases
Judges Tell the Stories of Some of the Hardest Decisions They’ve Ever Made$22.99 – $27.99“Tough Cases stands out as a genuine revelation. . . . Our most distinguished judges should follow the lead of this groundbreaking volume.”
—Justin Driver, The Washington PostA rare and illuminating view of how judges decide dramatic legal cases—Law and Order from behind the bench—including the Elián González, Terri Schiavo, and Scooter Libby cases
Prosecutors and defense attorneys have it easy—all they have to do is to present the evidence and make arguments. It’s the judges who have the heavy lift: they are the ones who have to make the ultimate decisions, many of which have profound consequences on the lives of the people standing in front of them.
In Tough Cases, judges from different kinds of courts in different parts of the country write about the case that proved most difficult for them to decide. Some of these cases received international attention: the Elián González case in which Judge Jennifer Bailey had to decide whether to return a seven-year-old boy to his father in Cuba after his mother drowned trying to bring the child to the United States, or the Terri Schiavo case in which Judge George Greer had to decide whether to withdraw life support from a woman in a vegetative state over the wishes of her parents, or the Scooter Libby case about appropriate consequences for revealing the name of a CIA agent. Others are less well-known but equally fascinating: a judge on a Native American court trying to balance U.S. law with tribal law, a young Korean American former defense attorney struggling to adapt to her new responsibilities on the other side of the bench, and the difficult decisions faced by a judge tasked with assessing the mental health of a woman who has killed her own children.
Relatively few judges have publicly shared the thought processes behind their decision making. Tough Cases makes for fascinating reading for everyone from armchair attorneys and fans of Law and Order to those actively involved in the legal profession who want insight into the people judging their work.
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A Perilous Path
Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law$14.99 – $15.99A frank and enlightening discussion on race and the law in America today, from some of our leading legal minds—including the bestselling author of Just Mercy
This blisteringly candid discussion of the American racial dilemma in the age of Black Lives Matter brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear.
Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these titans of the legal profession discuss the importance of working for justice in an unjust time.
Covering topics as varied as “the commonality of pain,” “when ‘public’ became a dirty word,” and the concept of an “equality dividend” that is due to people of color for helping America brand itself internationally as a country of diversity and acceptance, Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, and Anthony C. Thompson engage in a deeply thought-provoking discussion on the law’s role in both creating and solving our most pressing racial quandaries. A Perilous Path will speak loudly and clearly to everyone concerned about America’s perpetual fault line.
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Start Here
A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration$24.99As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air
Recommended by The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts
“Start Here is an urgent and timely primer on the approaches that are working and don’t require federal approval or political revolution to end one of the most pressing justice issues the country faces today.”
—Brooklyn Daily EagleA bold agenda for criminal justice reform based on equal parts pragmatism and idealism, from the visionary director of the Center for Court Innovation, a leader of the reform movement
Everyone knows that the United States leads the world in incarceration, and that our political process is gridlocked. What can be done right now to reduce the number of people sent to jail and prison? This essential book offers a concrete roadmap for both professionals and general readers who want to move from analysis to action. In this forward-looking, next-generation criminal justice reform book, Greg Berman and Julian Adler of the Center for Court Innovation highlight the key lessons from these programs—engaging the public in preventing crime, treating all defendants with dignity and respect, and linking people to effective community-based interventions rather than locking them up. Along the way, they tell a series of gripping stories, highlighting gang members who have gotten their lives back on track, judges who are transforming their courtrooms, and reformers around the country who are rethinking what justice looks like.
While Start Here offers no silver bullets, it does put forth a suite of proven reforms—from alternatives to bail to diversion programs for mentally ill defendants—that will improve the lives of thousands of people right now. Start Here is a must-read for everyone who wants to start dismantling mass incarceration without waiting for a revolution or permission. Proceeds from the book will support the Center for Court Innovation’s reform efforts.
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The Drone Memos
Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law$27.95 – $27.99“A trenchant summation” and analysis of the legal rationales behind the US drone policy of targeted killing of suspected terrorists, including US citizens (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In the long response to 9/11, the US government initiated a deeply controversial policy of “targeted killing”—the extrajudicial execution of suspected terrorists and militants, typically via drones. A remarkable effort was made to legitimize this practice; one that most human rights experts agree is illegal and that the United States has historically condemned.
In The Drone Memos, civil rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer presents and assesses the legal memos and policy documents that enabled the Obama administration to put this program into action. In a lucid and provocative introduction, Jaffer, who led the ACLU legal team that secured the release of many of the documents, evaluates the drone memos in light of domestic and international law. He connects the documents’ legal abstractions to the real-world violence they allow, and makes the case that we are trading core principles of democracy and human rights for the illusion of security.
“A careful study of a secretive counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining endless, orderless war, this book is profoundly necessary.” —Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation -
Before I Do
A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwise$14.99 – $15.99A comprehensive guide to marriage—perks, consequences, and everything in between—aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, from a leading gay rights lawyer.
Not long ago, same-sex couples had to jump through endless hoops to make their relationships even close to legal. Happily, those days are over. But here’s the rub: many gay and lesbian couples, accustomed to living off-grid, are so thrilled to have the benefits of marriage that they jump into it without fully considering the consequences.
In Before I Do, leading gay rights attorney Elizabeth F. Schwartz spells out the range of practical considerations any couple should address before tying the knot. She explains the rights married couples have—and those they do not. With cameos from some of the most prominent LGBTQ+ professionals, Schwartz explores all of the implications of marriage from name changes and getting a license to taxes, insurance, Social Security, and much more.
Chapters on estate planning, pre- and post-nuptial agreements, and organizing finances make Before I Do a crucial handbook for anyone considering marriage—because, as Schwartz explains, just because you can get married does not mean you should.
“During my thirty years of covering the gay beat for the Miami Herald, never did I imagine the need for a marriage guide for LGBT couples. Yet today nothing is more urgent. Before I Do guides all couples, gay and otherwise, about the responsibilities of marriage. Ignore it at your peril.” —Steve Rothaus, The Miami Herald -
A War Like No Other
The Constitution in a Time of Terror$27.95 – $27.99“A scholarly and cautionary collection of essays focusing on what [Fiss] views as the post-9/11 debasements of key provisions of the Constitution” (Kirkus Reviews).
A leading legal scholar for more than thirty years, Owen Fiss’s focus was civil procedure and equal protection. But when the War on Terror began to shroud legal proceedings in secrecy, he realized the bulwarks of procedure that shield the individual from the awesome power of the state were dissolving, perhaps irreparably, and that it was time for him to speak up.
The ten chapters in this volume cover the major legal battlefronts of the War on Terror from Guantánamo to drones, with a focus on the constitutional implications of those new tools. The underlying theme is Fiss’s concern for the offense done to the US Constitution by the administrative and legislative branches of government in the name of public safety and the refusal of the judiciary to hold the government accountable. A War Like No Other is an essential intellectual foundation for all concerned about constitutional rights and the law in a new age.
“Fiss is one of our most clear-eyed and hard-edged constitutional analysts, and this critique of the damage done to our constitutional heritage in the name of waging a war on terror is the most devastating I have seen.” —Stanley N. Katz, director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies
“An essential contribution from one of the country’s foremost legal scholars.” —Jonathan Hafetz, former senior attorney for the National Security project of the ACLU
“Thought-provoking.” —Publishers Weekly
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Privacy in the Modern Age
The Search for Solutions$25.95The threats to privacy are well known: the National Security Agency tracks our phone calls; Google records where we go online and how we set our thermostats; Facebook changes our privacy settings when it wishes; Target gets hacked and loses control of our credit card information; our medical records are available for sale to strangers; our children are fingerprinted and their every test score saved for posterity; and small robots patrol our schoolyards and drones may soon fill our skies.The contributors to this anthology don’t simply describe these problems or warn about the loss of privacy—they propose solutions. They look closely at business practices, public policy, and technology design, and ask, “Should this continue? Is there a better approach?” They take seriously the dictum of Thomas Edison: “What one creates with his hand, he should control with his head.” It’s a new approach to the privacy debate, one that assumes privacy is worth protecting, that there are solutions to be found, and that the future is not yet known. This volume will be an essential reference for policy makers and researchers, journalists and scholars, and others looking for answers to one of the biggest challenges of our modern day. The premise is clear: there’s a problem—let’s find a solution.
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Madison’s Music
On Reading the First Amendment$25.95 – $25.99“A detailed history of the transformation of First Amendment law” from one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers (The New York Times).
Are you sitting down? It turns out that everything you learned about the First Amendment is wrong. For too long, we’ve been treating small, isolated snippets of the text as infallible gospel without looking at the masterpiece of the whole. Legal luminary Burt Neuborne argues that the structure of the First Amendment as well as of the entire Bill of Rights was more intentional than most people realize, beginning with the internal freedom of conscience and working outward to freedom of expression and finally freedom of public association. This design, Neuborne argues, was not to protect discrete individual rights—such as the rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections—but to guarantee that the process of democracy continues without disenfranchisement, oppression, or injustice.
Neuborne, who was the legal director of the ACLU and has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court, invites us to hear the “music” within the form and content of Madison’s carefully formulated text. When we hear Madison’s music, a democratic ideal flowers in front of us, and we can see that the First Amendment gives us the tools to fight for campaign finance reform, the right to vote, equal rights in the military, the right to be full citizens, and the right to prevent corporations from riding roughshod over the weakest among us. Neuborne gives us an eloquent lesson in democracy that informs and inspires.
“In the dark art of lawyering, Neuborne has always been considered a white knight.” —New York
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Equal Means Equal
The Case for Recognizing the ERA as the 28th Amendment$16.95 – $18.99When the Equal Rights Amendment was first passed by Congress in 1972, Richard Nixon was president and All in the Family‘s Archie Bunker was telling his feisty wife Edith to stifle it. Over the course of the next ten years, an initial wave of enthusiasm led to ratification of the ERA by thirty-five states, just three short of the thirty-eight states needed by the 1982 deadline. Many of the arguments against the ERA that historically stood in the way of ratification have gone the way of bouffant hairdos and Bobby Riggs, and a new Coalition for the ERA was recently set up to bring the experience and wisdom of old-guard activists together with the energy and social media skills of a new-guard generation of women.In a series of short, accessible chapters looking at several key areas of sex discrimination recognized by the Supreme Court, Equal Means Equal tells the story of the legal cases that inform the need for an ERA, along with contemporary cases in which women’s rights are compromised without the protection of an ERA. Covering topics ranging from pay equity and pregnancy discrimination to violence against women, Equal Means Equal makes abundantly clear that an ERA will improve the lives of real women living in America.
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Chasing Gideon
The Elusive Quest for Poor Peoples Justice$18.95 – $26.95First published to mark the fifty-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed the right to legal counsel for all criminal defendants, Chasing Gideon is “a hugely important book” (New York Law Journal) that gives us a visceral, unforgettable experience of our systemic failure to fulfill this basic constitutional right. Written in the tradition of Gideon’s Trumpet, by the late Anthony Lewis, this is “a book of nightmares,” as Leonard Pitts wrote in the Miami Herald, because it shows that the “‘justice system’ too often produces the opposite of what its name suggests, particularly for its most vulnerable constituents.”Following its publication, Chasing Gideon, which ACLU director Anthony Romero said “illustrates the scope and seriousness of the indigent defense crisis,” became an integral part of a growing national conversation about how to reform indigent defense in America, coordinated with an HBO documentary and a website to promote the book and the movie. The effort spread news about Chasing Gideon directly to public defenders offices nationwide and drove a national conversation about what Eric Holder called the “shameful state of affairs” of indigent defense (in the Washington Post).
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