Legal Instruction Resources

Incisive and timely, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a bottom-up history told from the viewpoint of African American and Latinx activists and revealing the radically different ways people of the diaspora addressed issues still plaguing the United States today.--Publisher

An award-winning historian reframes our continuing debate over immigration with a compelling history of xenophobia in the United States and its devastating impact.--Publisher

Combining the concepts and insights of critical legal studies and western/borderlands history, this book demonstrates how profoundly the North American West has been, and continues to be, a site of contradictory, overlapping, and overreaching legal structures and practices steeped in articulations of race, gender, and power.--Publisher

Boats, Borders, and Bases tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States.--Publisher

Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism.--Publisher

By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call--the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to "inferiors" in the 1920s.--Publisher

Melding race history, legal theory, theology, social psychology, and anecdotes, Eric K. Yamamoto offers a fresh look at race and responsibility. He tells tales of explosive conflicts and halting conciliatory efforts between African Americans and Korean and Vietnamese immigrant shop owners in Los Angeles and New Orleans. He also paints a fascinating picture of South Africa's controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as a pathbreaking Asian American apology to Native Hawaiians for complicity in their oppression.--Publisher

From the colonial period to the present, this book examines education, property ownership, voting rights, criminal justice, and the military as well as internationalism and civil liberties by analyzing the key court cases that established America's racial system and demonstrating the impact of these court cases on American society. This edition also includes more on Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos.--Publisher

Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law concludes that rather than relying on promises of formal equality, we will more effectively dismantle structural racism in America by envisioning what the right of all peoples to self-determination means in a settler colonial state.--Publisher

A major contribution of Hing's book is its emphasis on such often-overlooked issues as the competition between immigrants and African Americans, inter-group tension, and ethnic separatism, issues constantly brushed aside both by immigrant rights groups and the anti-immigrant right. Drawing on Hing's work as a lawyer deeply involved in the day-to-day life of his immigrant clients, To Be An American is a unique blend of substantive analysis, policy, and personal experience.—Publisher

The U.S. Supreme Court and Racial Minorities offers an in-depth, chronologically arranged look at the record of the U.S. Supreme Court on racial minorities over the course of its first two centuries. Goldstein examines treatment of four racial minorities (Indians, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics) in this investigation of the life-tenured Supreme Court's comparative willingness to protect racial minorities.--Publisher

Incisive and timely, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a bottom-up history told from the viewpoint of African American and Latinx activists and revealing the radically different ways people of the diaspora addressed issues still plaguing the United States today.--Publisher

In this book, Niambi Michele Carter argues that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic. Carter draws on original interview material and empirical data on African American political opinion to offer the first theory of black public opinion toward immigration.--Publisher

Zamalin argues that antiracism is a powerful tradition that is crucial for energizing American democracy. Through a study of major figures, texts and political movements, he traces the history of antislavery abolition, black socialism, and the civil rights movement, leading all the way up to the contemporary Movement for Black Lives.--Publisher

'At Canaan's Edge' chronicles dramatic campaigns in Mississippi and Alabama, King's tormented alliance with Lyndon Johnson, his painful break with Stokey Carmichael over black power, and persecution by Hoover's FBI.--Publisher

Bonds of Empire ultimately shows that plantation slavery and the laws that governed it were not beyond the pale of English imperial legal history; they were yet another invidious manifestation of English law's protean potential.--Publisher

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.--Publisher

The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks.--Publisher

Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.--Publisher

Priest shows how loans backed with slaves as property fueled slavery from the colonial era through the Civil War, and that increased access to credit was key to the explosive growth of capitalism in nineteenth-century America.--Publisher

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X--all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism.--Publisher

"Emancipation is an important and impressive work; one cannot read it without being inspired by the legal acumen, creativity, and resiliency these pioneer lawyers displayed. . . . It should be read by everyone interested in understanding the road African-Americans have traveled and the challenges that lie ahead."--From the Foreword, by Justice Thurgood Marshall

From Jim Crow To Civil Rights spells out in compelling detail the political and social context within which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of their decisions for American race relations.--Publisher

This edition carries the history of African Americans, and it also draws upon the latest historical scholarship. The new From Slavery to Freedom offers narrative, visual, and interpretive qualities that will appeal to today's readers.--Publisher

In this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected.--Publisher

A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa Race Massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most importantly, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.--Publisher

Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.--Publisher

Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.--Publisher

This book sets out in two appendices all of the race-conscious laws enacted in North Carolina between 1865 and 1920, but the author argues that the application and operation of the laws was much more important on the ground than the statutory text.--Publisher

In the first comprehensive accounting of the U.S. Supreme Court’s race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice.--Publisher

The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.--Publisher

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.--Publisher

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.--Publisher

Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.--Publisher

In this provocative and important book, Fair, the eighth of ten children born to a single mother on public assistance in an Ohio ghetto, combines two histories--America's and his own--to offer a compelling defense of affirmative action.--Publisher

An award-winning constitutional law historian examines case-based evidence of the court's longstanding support for white supremacy (often under the guise of "states rights") to reveal how that bias has allowed the court to solidify its position as arguably the most powerful branch of the federal government.--Publisher

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.--Publisher

Beginning with the Nation of Islam and conflict over racial separatism, Pillar of Fire takes the reader to Mississippi and Alabama: Birmingham, the murder of Medgar Evers, the "March on Washington," the Civil Rights Act, and voter registration drives. In 1964, King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.--Publisher

James Collins Johnson was an escaped slave working at Princeton University in 1843 when he was arrested and tried as a fugitive. Though convicted and slated for return to slavery, he was redeemed by a local white woman. By telling Johnson's story and examining the relationship between antebellum Princeton's black residents and the economic engine that supported their community, the book questions the distinction between employment and servitude that shrinks and threatens to disappear when an individual's freedom is circumscribed by immobility, lack of opportunity, and contingency on local interpretations of a hotly contested body of law.--Publisher

Volume 1. Part I. The antebellum Constitution; Part 2. The Thirteenth Amendment.
Volume 2. Part I. The Fourteenth Amendment; Part 2. The Fifteenth Amendment.
Kurt Lash has collected documents ranging campaign speeches and party platforms through personal diaries of leading (and obscure) figures, to the Confederate states' declarations of secession that help us understand the history and meaning of these critical amendments: the 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (citizenship, due process, equal protection), and 15th (expands right to vote).--Publisher

Representing the Race tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation.--Publisher

Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent.--Publisher

The history Jackson presents speaks volumes about the legacy of racism, as we can see similar arguments alive and well today in such books as The Bell Curve and in other debates on race, science, and intelligence. With meticulous research and a nuanced understanding of the complexities of race and law, Jackson tells a disturbing tale about race in America.--Publisher

In 1931, two white girls claimed they were savagely raped by nine young black men aboard a freight train moving across northeastern Alabama. The young men-ranging in age from twelve to nineteen-were quickly tried, and eight were sentenced to death. In his new introduction, Dan T. Carter looks back more than thirty-five years after he first wrote about the case, asking what we have learned that is new about it and what relevance the story of Scottsboro still has in the twenty-first century.--Publisher

An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws.--Publisher

In Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman addresses a central issue of the American founding: how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. This third edition of Slavery and the Founders incorporates a new chapter on the regulation and eventual (1808) banning of the African slave trade.--Publisher

In this groundbreaking book, Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history--the re-enslavement of black Americans from the Civil War to World War II--in a moving, sobering account that explores the insidious legacy of white racism that reverberates today.--Publisher

John P. Jackson, Jr., examines the well-known studies used in support of Brown v. Board of Education, such as Kenneth Clark's famous doll tests, as well as decades of research on race which lead up to the case. Jackson reveals the struggles of social scientists in their effort to impact American law and policy on race and poverty and demonstrates that without these scientists, who brought their talents to bear on the most pressing issues of the day, we wouldn't enjoy the legal protections against discrimination we may now take for granted.--Publisher

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked 'a new birth of freedom' in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the 'nadir' of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.--Publisher

In ruling after ruling, the three most important pre-Civil War justices--Marshall, Taney, and Story--upheld slavery. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice's proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life.--Publisher

In The Sword and the Shield, acclaimed historian Peniel Joseph offers a dual biography of Malcolm and Martin and a more nuanced narrative that pushes us to completely reconsider these two leaders as well as the era they came to define.--Publisher

Unbought and Unbossed is Shirley Chisholm's account of her remarkable rise from young girl in Brooklyn to America's first African-American Congresswoman. This expanded edition, edited by Scott Simpson, digs deeper with analysis by experts like Donna Brazile and Shola Lynch exploring Shirley Chisholm's impact on today and tomorrow's world.--Publisher

A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War.--Publisher

In 1966, a group of black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, turned their backs on Martin Luther King's pacifism in order to build on the legacy of Malcolm X. The result? The Black Power movement, a radical new approach to the fight for equality. Joseph traces the history of the men and women of the movement - many famous and infamous, some forgotten.--Publisher

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.--Publisher

When Affirmative Action Was White demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. This was no accident.--Publisher

As a naturalized Filipino American, Romero brings an outsider's perspective to Alienated, forcing us to look at constitutional immigration law from the vantage point of people whose citizenship status is murky (either legally or from the viewpoint of other citizens and lawmakers), including foreign-born adoptees, undocumented immigrants, tourists, foreign students, and same-gender bi-national partners.--Publisher

The landmark case established the principle that jus soli (geographically defined birthright citizenship) extended even to the children of US residents who were themselves barred from naturalization on racial grounds. In recent years, birthright citizenship in the United States has provoked renewed controversy. In a political moment when Americans are deeply divided over immigration, there is a special need to understand anew the history behind the longstanding principle that even the children of undocumented immigrants are citizens when they are born in the United States.--Publisher

This book provides a sweeping and nuanced history of Asian Americans, revealing how and why the perception of Asian immigrants changed over time.--Publisher

John S. W. Park argues that American rules governing citizenship and belonging remain fundamentally unjust, even though they suggest the triumph of a "civil rights" vision, where all citizens share the same basic rights. By continuing to privilege members over non-members in ways that are politically popular, these rules mask injustices that violate principles of fairness. Importantly, Elusive Citizenship also suggests that politically and socially, full membership in American society remains closely linked with participation in exclusionary practices that isolate racial minorities in America.--Publisher

Daniels traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the 1980s about the wartime cases and offers a sobering account that resonates with present-day issues of national security and individual freedom.--Publisher

This book describes the historical and legal experiences of Americans of Asian ancestry who began to come to the United States in the mid-19th century.--Publisher

Kang's exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together amid a wave of anti-Asian violence. In response, he calls for a new form of immigrant solidarity--one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.--Publisher

The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject.--Publisher

Covering the history of Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Indians as well as Chinese and Japanese, the book gives full attention to the diversity within Asian America.--Publisher

Ancheta examines legal and social theories of racial discrimination, ethnic differences in the Asian American population, nativism, citizenship, language, school desegregation, and affirmative action. In the revised edition of this influential book, Ancheta also covers post-9/11 anti-Asian sentiment and racial profiling.--Publisher

In 1959, the Supreme Court ushered in a new era of Indian law, which recognizes Indian tribes as permanent governments within the federal constitutional system and, on the whole, honors old promises to the Indians. Drawing together historical sources such as the records of treaty negotiations with the Indians, classic political theory on the nature of sovereignty, and anthropological studies of societal change, Wilkinson evaluates the Court’s work in Indian law over the past twenty-five years and considers the effects of time on law.--Publisher

The story of the extraordinary gains by Indian tribes over the second half of the twentieth century.--Publisher.

Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military.--Publisher

In 2007 the United Nations approved the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. United States endorsement in 2010 ushered in a new era of Indian law and policy. This book highlights steps that the United States, as well as other nations, must take to provide a more just society and heal past injustices committed against indigenous peoples.--Publisher

Red Nation Rising is the first book ever to investigate and explain the violent dynamics of bordertowns. Bordertowns are white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same political and spatial logics as all other American towns and cities. The difference is that these settlements get their name from their location at the borders of current-day reservation boundaries, which separates the territory of sovereign Native nations from lands claimed by the United States.--Publisher

Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood--paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.--Publisher

Incisive and timely, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a bottom-up history told from the viewpoint of African American and Latinx activists and revealing the radically different ways people of the diaspora addressed issues still plaguing the United States today.--Publisher

Through strikingly original historical analysis, extensive personal interviews and a careful examination of census data, Clara E. Rodriguez shows that Latino identity is surprisingly fluid, situation-dependent, and constantly changing. She illustrates how the way Latinos are defining themselves, and refusing to define themselves, represents a powerful challenge to America's system of racial classification and American racism.--Publisher

Through the lens of critical race theory, Valencia details why and how Mexican American parents and their children have been forced to resort to legal action. Chicano Students and the Courts engages the many areas that have spurred Mexican Americans to legal battle, including school segregation, financing, special education, bilingual education, school closures, undocumented students, higher education financing, and high-stakes testing, ultimately situating these legal efforts in the broader scope of the Mexican American community's overall struggle for the right to an equal education.--Publisher

In The Emergence of Mexican America, John-Michael Rivera examines the cultural, political, and legal representations of Mexican Americans and the development of US capitalism and nationhood.--Publisher

Although fighting against cultural stereotypes can be a daunting task, Bender reminds us that, while hard to break, they do not have to be permanent. Greasers and Gringos begins the charge of debunking existing stereotypes and implores all Americans to re-imagine Latinos/as as legal and social equals.--Publisher

Laura E. Gomez, a leading expert on race in America, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity.--Publisher

Steeped in conversations and debates surrounding the social construction of race, this book reveals how certain groups become racialized, and how racial categories can not only change instantly, but also the ways in which they change over time. This new edition is updated to reflect the most recent evidence regarding the ways in which Mexican Americans and other Latinos were racialized in both the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.--Publisher

Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of "whiteness" for economic, scientific, and political ends.--Publisher

National Book Award-winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family's anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.--Publisher

As recalled in Honky, Dalton Conley's childhood has all of the classic elements of growing up in America. But the fact that he was one of the few white boys in a mostly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side makes Dalton's childhood unique.--Publisher

Argues that the economic system itself is culpable in maintaining our oppressive educational status quo.--Publisher