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Lawyers don’t often admit this in mixed company, but Madiba Dennie wants to let you in on a secret: There's no one true way to interpret the Constitution. Americans saw just how subjective it can be when the Supreme Court denied basic bodily autonomy to millions of people in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, suggesting that our rights and liberties are frozen in a cherry-picked version of history. This is a line of constitutional interpretation called originalism—a framework that says we must be constrained by the meaning of the Constitution's text when it was written.

Free speech is a human right, and the free expression of thought is at the very essence of being human. The United States was founded on this premise, and the First Amendment remains the single greatest constitutional commitment to the right of free expression in history. Yet there is a systemic effort to bar opposing viewpoints on subjects ranging from racial discrimination to police abuse, from climate change to gender equity. The Indispensable Right places the current attacks on free speech in their proper historical, legal, and political context.

When Harvard and Yale trained property law scholar Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon, in which thousands occupied vacant homes without the permission of the record owner. After a long sojourn in South Africa, where she researched the theft of land and homes from Black citizens, she wanted to immerse herself in a project that showcased Black agency. And yet what she found in Detroit was too urgent to ignore.

On the 25th anniversary of the Scottish Parliament, this book captures an important moment in contemporary history: how a grassroots women's movement, harking back to the suffragettes and second wave feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, took on the political establishment - and changed the course of history. Through a collection of over thirty essays and photographs, some of the women involved tell the story of the five-year campaign to protect women's sex-based rights.

The murder of Sarah Payne, Adam the Thames Torso, the London bombings, the Night Stalker and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. The solving of all these cases can be linked to one man: Ray Fysh, a beer-swigging Charlton Athletic fan from Woolwich, a natural raconteur, and also one of the finest forensic detectives the country has ever seen. Ray began work for the Met Police in the 1970s when forensic investigation was seen as little more than a geeky side show, only in existence to confirm or eliminate evidence. But by the mid '90s Ray and his team had made huge progress in their field.

A fierce and galvanizing reminder that resistance is everywhere in the fight for abortion and reproductive justice in the United States. Fighting Mad is a book about what "reproductive justice" means and what it looks like to fight for it. Editors Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger bring together many of the strongest, most resistant voices in the country to describe the impacts of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on abortion access and care.

David Tatel has served nearly 30 years on America’s second highest court, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where many of our most crucial cases are resolved—or teed up for the Supreme Court. He has championed equal justice for his entire adult life; decided landmark environmental and voting cases; and embodied the ideal of what a great judge should be. Yet he has been blind for the past 50 of his 80-plus years.

In her inspiring, intimate memoir, the first Black woman to ever be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States chronicles her extraordinary life story.

Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives, many people have grown frustrated under a system of government that constantly demands compromise. More and more on both the right and the left have come to blame the Constitution for the resulting discord. But the Constitution is not the problem we face; it is the solution. Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, conservative scholar Yuval Levin’s American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines.

Widely known as the "poor man's lawyer" in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818-1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. In this revealing and accessible biography, Stephen D. Engle traces Andrew's life and legacy, giving this important, but largely forgotten, figure his due.

In Fear and the First Amendment, Kevin A. Johnson and Craig R. Smith offer an examination of the ways fear figures in First Amendment questions ruled on by the Supreme Court. Johnson and Smith focus on the rulings from the Roberts Court. Each chapter in this book analyzes one or more First Amendment cases and a variety of related fears that pertain to a given case.

In Fearless Speech, Dr. Mary Anne Franks emphasizes the distinction between what speech a democratic society should protect and what speech a democratic society should promote. While the First Amendment in theory is politically neutral, in practice it has been legally deployed most visibly and effectively to promote powerful antidemocratic interests: misogyny, racism, religious zealotry, and corporate self-interest--in other words, reckless speech. Instead, Franks argues, we need to focus on fearless speech.

The Yurok Tribe and an Indigenous family share a moving multigenerational story of their fight to undam the Klamath river—the largest river restoration project in history—and save the planet.

Cynric Temple-Camp, bestselling author of The Cause of Death and The Quick and the Dead, returns with more strange-but-true stories of death, disease and murder, as well as new perspectives on high-profile cases, including the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, the trial of Mark Lundy, and the ill-fated journey of Ansett New Zealand Flight 703.

In 1989, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.” The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses, and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder, and it ignored later efforts to correct this error. The state’s bureaucratic intransigence caused Spencer to spend more than half his life in prison.

With painstaking and enlightening research, Vigilante Nation exposes the insidious network of right-wing lawyers, politicians, funders, and preachers who are deploying vigilantism to cement their hold on power and impose a theocratic version of America.

This concise but comprehensive book lays out specific answers to myriad topical questions about free speech law, and also general explanations of how and why the law distinguishes between protected and punishable speech. The book focuses on modern First Amendment law, explaining the historic factors that propelled its evolution in a more speech-protective direction—in particular, the Civil Rights Movement. It highlights the many cases, involving multiple issues, in which robust speech-protective principles aided advocates of racial justice and other human rights causes.

In 1925, hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the “trial of the century,” where a young schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was charged with teaching evolution to his biology class. Darwin’s theory that species evolved over time through natural selection was viewed as a threat to the nation. Two legendary attorneys, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, drew massive crowds in a trial that quickly became a circus-like media sensation—but it was much more than that.

Anthony Kennedy did not take the usual path to a seat on the Supreme Court. Often, the phrase “constitutional lawyer” brings to mind graduates of fine universities engaged in philosophic discourse as they walk the halls of government. Although Kennedy attended Stanford and the London School of Economics and then Harvard Law School, he made his way as a lawyer with a wide-ranging small-town practice that included criminal and civil trials, advice in forming and managing corporations, estate planning, and tax advice.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought large-scale warfare to Europe, reshaped relations between key global players, and redefined existing alliances and international organizations, such as NATO and the European Union. It has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, revived the threat of a nuclear war between Russia and the West and might unleash a global famine. Political scientist and historian of genocide Eugene Finkel zooms in on the intersection of one of the most important geopolitical events in recent decades and the most odious type of violence.