Justice

How the FBI's doomed attempt to stop criminal activity conducted via mobile phones shaped the regime of ubiquitous backdoor surveillance under which we live today.

Since the 1960s, border enforcement and deterrence policies have made migrants vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

The unconventional origins of the modern antiwar movement.

Before Salem, this small town succumbed to the witch-hunting fever.

Trump champions “law and order” while calling for the Constitution’s suspension. But there’s no tension between the two.

A sharp uptick in challenges to U.S. antidiscrimination laws threatens decades of progress in extending civil rights to all.

Thousands of free-born Black people in the North were kidnapped into slavery through networks that operated as a form of “Reverse Underground Railroad.”

The history of segregation in the Navy — and its abolition — show how to combat institutionalized bigotry.

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the future of affirmative action, I knew I had to be there.

The bonfire was a public spectacle for Black people, as well as any white dissenters. It was a calculated warning.

The evolution of the right to privacy.

The more liberals present originalist arguments, the more they legitimate originalism.

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

The author of a new biography explains how liberals played an important role in enabling Hoover’s antidemocratic crusade.

Legend says that the campaign to save abused children in New York was driven by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The truth is more complicated.

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.

With Kanye and Kyrie Irving dominating the news, the connections between victims of white supremacy are more relevant than ever.

Before his abuses of power were exposed, he was celebrated as a scourge of Nazis, Communists, and subversives.

After Texas Rangers and ranchers shot 15 unarmed men and boys in 1918, Porvenir killings were largely forgotten.

The FBI’s successful campaign against white supremacists is also a cautionary tale.

The labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by a Utah firing squad for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.

The justices’ decision not to hear challenges to the explicitly racist Insular Cases is part of a long tradition of favoring process over substance.

The F.B.I. director promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within.

The oft forgetten story of fugitive slaves whose escape from bondage found them in the Antebellum South's major cities.

Behind his tough image, the longtime FBI director was a man of profound contradictions.

A quiet movement that began in the 1920s didn’t disappear—it just went underground.

Haaland v. Brackeen could have major consequences for tribes’ right to exist as political entities.

The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

Enslaved women’s experiences with war must be extended to include the everyday warfare of slavery.

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.