A shelf
The Courts
The Spirit of the Laws
Three branches, separated so that no hand holds all the power: that idea is Montesquieu's, named and argued here before the Framers carried it across an...
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...
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,...
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...
Taking Rights Seriously
Rights as trumps, law as integrity. Dworkin argued that law is not merely a set of rules but a fabric of principles, and that individual rights...
The Concept of Law
What law is, asked and answered with a clarity that reset the field. Hart describes a legal system as the union of primary rules that govern...
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....
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...
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...
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Popper's war work, written in exile, a defense of the open society against the thinkers who would close it, Plato among them. The test of a...