If you read
the Courts
Read these
Gideon's Trumpet
How a great right reaches one actual person. Lewis follows a single handwritten petition from a Florida prison cell, written by a man with no lawyer,...
America's Constitution: A Biography
The Constitution read the way the founders asked it to be read: closely, clause by clause, word by word, as a written instrument that rewards attention....
Democracy and Distrust
The most influential answer to the hardest question about courts: when should unelected judges overrule the elected majority? Ely's answer is elegant. Courts should step in...
The Bill of Rights
The first ten amendments, won because the Anti-Federalists pressed for them and Madison wrote them into being. The First protects speech, press, assembly, and worship. The...
The Common Law
The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. With that opening, Holmes organized a whole jurisprudence around the idea that law...
The New Jim Crow
The book that recast the national argument over criminal justice by naming what it does. Alexander argues that mass incarceration functions as a system of racial...
Brown v. Board of Education, the Opinion
The unanimous opinion that ended legal segregation in American schools, and one of the rare court rulings every citizen should read in the original. Separate educational...
Field Notes on the Republic
The Reading Room in motion. A fresh essay every morning on the republic, its arguments, and its history, the same long view as the shelf, written...