law / civil rights

"... [Presents] a handbook showing how racial justice and restorative justice can transform the African-American experience in America"--Amazon.

Author Nell Bernstein argues that there is no "good way" to lock up a child, as she investigates the flaws within the juvenile justice system.

"By a brilliant young constitutional scholar at the University of Chicago--who clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for Judge Merrick B. Garland and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer, and who also happens to be an elegant stylist--a powerfully alarming book concerned to vindicate the constitutional rights of public school students, so often trampled upon by the Supreme Court in recent decades Supreme Court decisions involving the constitutional rights of students in the nation's public schools have consistently been most controversial. From racial segregation to unauthorized immigration, from economic inequality to public prayer and homeschooling: these are but a few of the many divisive issues that the Supreme Court has addressed vis-a-vis elementary and secondary education. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education. It argues that since the 1970s, the Supreme Court through its decisions has transformed public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court's decisions over the last four decades would conclude that the following actions taken by school officials pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporeal punishment on students without any procedural protections; searching students and their possessions, without probable cause, in bids to uncover violations of school rules; engaging in random drug testing of students who are not suspected of any wrongdoing; and suppressing student speech solely for the viewpoint that it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have validated a wide array of constitutionally dubious actions, including: repressive student dress codes; misguided "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies; degrading student strip searches; and harsh restrictions on off-campus speech in the internet age. Justin Driver dramatically and keenly surveys this battlefield of constitutional meaning and warns that impoverished views of constitutional protections will only further rend our social fabric"--.

"Answering the Call is an extraordinary eyewitness account from an unsung hero of the battle for racial equality in America-a battle that, far from ending with the great victories of the civil rights era, saw some of its signal achievements in the desegregation fights of the 1970s and its most notable setbacks in the affirmative action debates that continue into the present in Ferguson, Baltimore, and beyond. Judge Nathaniel R. Jones's pathbreaking career was forged in the 1960s: as the first African American assistant U.S. attorney in Ohio; as assistant general counsel of the Kerner Commission; and, beginning in 1969, as general counsel of the NAACP. In that latter role, Jones coordinated attacks against Northern school segregation-a vital, divisive, and poorly understood chapter in the movement for equality-twice arguing in the pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case Bradley v. Milliken, which addressed school desegregation in Detroit. He also led the national response to the attacks against affirmative action, spearheading and arguing many of the signal legal cases of that effort. Judge Jones's story is an essential corrective to the idea of a post-racial America--his voice and his testimony offering enduring evidence of the unfinished work of ending Jim Crow's legacy. "--.

"Anchored in personal stories...[Pulitizer Prize winner David K.] Shipler's investigations of the cultural limits on both expression and the willingness to listen build to expose troubling instabilities in the very foundations of our democracy...'Freedom of Speech' reveals the triumphs and challenges of defining and protecting the boundaries of freeexpression in modern America"--amazon.com.

Examines the relationship between the United States, and gun control.