Justice

Without a more fundamental transformation of criminal law, public defenders often provide only a limited form of equality and fairness before the law.

The celebration of Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the needs and struggles of ordinary people.

Black women in Georgia have shaped local and state politics for more than a century.

Julia Gaffield reviews two books that discuss the transatlantic slave trade.

Today's heated political arguments over censorship and misinformation online are rooted in a 26-word snippet of a law that created the Internet as we know it.

An ex-minister named John Lyford arrived at the nascent colony hoping for a fresh start. But he couldn’t escape his past.

How the presumption of bystanders’ responsibility crystallized into the predominant opinion.

Appeals to childhood innocence helped enshrine undocumented kids’ access to education. But this has also inadvertently reinforced criminalization.

Ida B. Wells reported on lynching in the South, risking her own safety.

Why his reformist retelling of the Chicago Seven fails to tell the real story of the leftists on trial.

Hidden disenfranchisement is as much of a problem as long lines at the polls.

Joel Rhone reviews Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

An overlooked corner of the Constitution hints at a right to be protected from infection.

History shows that the text is far more complex than the legal doctrine might indicate.

History suggests that what you see on the campaign trail, or even in a candidate’s past record, is not always what you get from a president once in power.

Beyond packing schemes, we need to diminish the high court’s power.

Court packing obscures more than it reveals about the current debate over the size of the Supreme Court.

The study of circuit riding helps to highlight the importance of the lower federal courts in American legal history.

How systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and hobbled his ambition.

With "A Theory Of Justice," Rawls became the most influential political philosopher of his time — just as the liberal agenda he supported was retreating.

The history of suffrage in the South—indeed, the nation—is messy and fraught, and more contentious than is typically remembered.

During the Cold War era, communist activists and their families suffered from harassment by the federal government.

On the corrupt, contaminated, deceptive world of 19th-century food adulteration, and how Cohen's own work straddles pure academia and public-facing scholarship.

The children who desegregated America.

The idea that justices exist outside of politics is a relatively new concept.

A new book documents the history of three specific mechanisms of expulsion: formal deportation, voluntary departure, and "self-deportation."

The Supreme Court, the federal branch with the least public accountability, has historically sided with tradition over more expansive human rights visions.

The activists of the 1990s worked so diligently that they were written out of history.

How American policing grew out of efforts to control the labor of poor and enslaved people.

Philadelphia’s PAL and the Black Panther Party’s efforts to mold black youth into their own image.