Law Archives

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don’t want black women voting. And then there are the “Antis”–women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel’s, and the Bible. […Learn More]

Big Dirty Money: Making White Collar Criminals Pay

How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful–and how we can stop it.

There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1% […Learn More]

The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class, and violence, told through a murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American neighborhood.

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. […Learn More]

The Nazi Hunters

After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. “Absorbing” (Kirkus Reviews) and “fascinating” (Library Journal), The Nazi Hunters focuses on the men and women who refused to allow their crimes to be forgotten. […Learn More]

The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own

In The Right to Repair, Aaron Perzanowski analyzes the history of repair to show how we’ve arrived at this moment, when a battle over repair is being waged – largely unnoticed – in courtrooms, legislatures, and administrative agencies. With deft, lucid prose, Perzanowski explains the opaque and complex legal landscape that surrounds the right to repair and shows readers how to fight back. […Learn More]

Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe

The staggering story of an unlikely band of mothers in the 1970s who discovered Hooker Chemical’s deadly secret of Love Canal—exposing one of America’s most devastating toxic waste disasters and sparking the modern environmental movement as we know it today. […Learn More]

The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America

A riveting Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries—and how much has not […Learn More]

Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times

From the author of Unlikely Allies and Indivisible comes the remarkable story of John Marshall who, as chief justice, statesman, and diplomat, played a pivotal role in the founding of the United States.

No member of America’s Founding Generation had a greater impact on the Constitution and the Supreme Court than John Marshall, and no one did more to preserve the delicate unity of the fledgling United States. […Learn More]

Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality

The first major biography of one of our most influential judges—an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary—that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century. […Learn More]

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy

Pegasus is widely regarded as the most effective and sought-after cyber-surveillance system on the market. The system’s creator, the NSO Group, a private corporation headquartered in Israel, is not shy about proclaiming its ability to thwart terrorists and criminals. “Thousands of people in Europe owe their lives to hundreds of our company employees,” NSO’s cofounder declared in 2019. This bold assertion may be true, at least in part, but it’s by no means the whole story. […Learn More]