When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Ernest Drucker’s A Plague of Prisons takes the same concepts and tools of public health that have...

When a prisoner on death row is executed, it's not just the families of the murderer and the victim who feel the effects. The attorneys, the jury, the law enforcement officers, the prison guards, the wardens overseeing the execution, the chaplains and...

The rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors now decide whom to punish and how severely. Almost no one accused of a crime will ever face a jury. Inconsistent policing, rampant plea bargaining, overcrowded courtrooms, and...

When it comes to race and racial issues these are strange times for all Americans. More than forty years afterBrown v. Board of Education put an end to segregation of the races by law, current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, and...

A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in AmericaThe huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has...

The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.They say that history is written by the victors. But...

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PUBLISHERS PROSE AWARD FINALIST ^ "Essential and fresh and vital . . . It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race...

A powerfully moving book that “could make graspable why today’s prisons are contemporary slave plantations” (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple), giving voice to the poorest among us and laying bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often...

The life story of the most controversial, volatile, and misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights and “a welcome re-injection of historical context into the present debate over the rightful role of guns in American culture” (Chicago Tribune).At a...

This book is a sweeping indictment of the legal profession in the realm of constitutional interpretation. The adversarial, advocacy-based American legal system is well suited to American justice, in which one-sided arguments collide to produce a just...

One of the New York Times' 6 New Paperbacks to Read Now in paperback and with new material, a 2021 Kirkus Best Book of the year in both Nonfiction and Current Events, the book Naomi Klein called: “a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift...

Keeping the Faith is an ambitous and accessible history of the nation's highest court. John E. Semonche demonstrates that the fabric of American constitutional law promotes in citizens a 'civil religion, ' or a faith in the laws and institutions of...

The words of the U.S. Constitution limit the possibilities of political action: they bind us in certain ways. How they bind us, however, depends upon how these words are interpreted and upon the distinctively American practice of judicial review.In Words...

How have online protests―like the recent outrage over the Komen Foundation’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood―changed the nature of political action? How do Facebook and other popular social media platforms shape the conversation around current...

"A MUST-READ FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN UNDERSTANDING AND DISMANTLING MASS INCARCERATION." ―Chesa Boudin, District Attorney of San FranciscoAmerica's criminal justice system is among the deadliest and most racist in the world and it disproportionally...

Elite, personable, and persuasive, Edward Douglass White, a ''large and bearish man from Louisiana, '' served on the United States Supreme Court for twenty-seven years. During his tenure, first as an associate justice (1894-1910) and then as the ninth...

The landmark school desegregation case in retrospect