How a convergence of policy, law, and profit drives the use of criminal background checks in hiringMost employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus...

A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities.Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces...

From Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita, comes an eye-opening story about the first major spousal rape trial in America and urgent questions it raised about women's rights that would reverberate for decades. In 1978, Greta Rideout was...

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's...

How concentrated economic and political power in America protects elites and fosters violence of all kinds The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate...

From Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a glimpse of her journey to the Court and an account of her approach to the ConstitutionSince her confirmation hearing, Americans have peppered Justice Amy Coney Barrett with questions. How has she adjusted...

NYT EDITOR'S CHOICE • Peabody Award finalist • National Headliner Award winner • WASHINGTON POST BEST NONFICTION OF 2023 • Shortlisted for the 2024 Chicago Review of Books Award • FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF HIGH-RISERS comes a groundbreaking...

“A brilliant history of a weaponized mantra.” —The GuardianA leading intellectual historian shows how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented as an unalloyed good, with enormous consequences for our society today.Every...

A fascinating study of the legal underpinnings of capitalism, reasons why the system must be transformed, and actions we can takeEven though capitalism has been conventionally described as an economic system, it is actually a deeply entrenched legal...

Anthony Kennedy’s journey from an idyllic youth in 1940s Sacramento to service on the highest courts in America.Anthony Kennedy did not take the usual path to a seat on the Supreme Court. Often, the phrase “constitutional lawyer” brings to mind graduates...

"This wholly original book provides the untold history of punishment inside prisons. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the invention of the corrections profession that imposed radical restrictions on human movement as if doing so was normal. She weaves...

"Eye-opening."---The New York Times (Barbara Ehrenreich)"Butler offers a broader set of proposals [that are] eminently sensible.---The New York Review of Books"A can't-put-it-down call to action from a progressive former prosecutor...smart and very...

From "one of our most prodigious constitutional scholars" (Jonathan Eig), the definitive history of how the ideal of birth equality reshaped the American Constitution, from antebellum debates over slavery and secession, to the Civil War and emancipation,...

This first book in the Nation/OR Books co-publishing project argues our reactionary Supreme Court is no aberration, but the endpoint of a long history of demands for a democratic, accountable judiciary that have gone unheeded.If the right-wing Supreme...

Why black women’s stories of encounters with the police are missing from official and unofficial accounts of police violenceIn The Secrets of Silence, Shannon Malone Gonzalez investigates how the policing of black women is tied to the policing of their...

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society?...