Justice

The greatest unsolved murders in Los Angeles' history, bloodier than the Black Dahlia, more vicious than the hit on Bugsy Siegel, occurred on a night in 1871.

David Garland makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.

Is there still a civil rights movement?

Reconsidering Septima Clark’s life challenges many of our ideas about the Civil Rights Movement and women's roles in it.

The Communist Party fought for racial equality in the South, specifically Alabama, where segregation was most oppressive.

The Ludlow massacre revisited.

During the half-century between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, class warfare in the United States was always robust, usually ferocious, and often homicidal.

A century ago, Springfield, Illinois, descended into a two-day spasm of racial violence and mayhem that still has the power to shock.

Was the 2008 Heller decision a victory for originalism or a living Constitution?

Down and dirty in eighteenth-century London and Boston.

In 2005, Howard Zinn explained why it was naive to depend on the Court to defend the rights of marginalized Americans.

With the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, George W. Bush restarts a long and troubled tradition.

For the English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

How sexual assault victims in colonial America navigated a legal system that was enormously stacked against them.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the galvanizing voice of the civil rights struggle, an uncompromising, complicated figure who soared in the pulpit.

Purposely brutalizing psychological experiments may have confirmed Theodore Kaczynski’s still-forming belief in the evil of science while he was in college.

Traditional Supreme Court precedent may depend too much on substantive due process to safeguard human rights.

How a historian's family history informed her professional quest to unpack the stories white Southerners told about themselves.

How do ideological debates on gender roles influence the abortion debate?

A challenge to the "Standard Model" scholars who hold that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights.

The moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination.

His experiences with racism and golf, from death threats in Memphis to breaking the sporting color barrier in South Africa.

Olympic track and field athlete reflects on the exclusion of African Americans from professional sports and the role his brother Jackie played in changing that.

On inclusion of African American athletes in college sports.

On traveling through the Jim Crow south as the sole Black athlete on a baseball team.

Though best known for his dedication to civil rights as Chief Justice, Earl Warren was a key figure behind Japanese internment in California - and stood by it.

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.

Confessions of an FBI special agent.

Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can.

Native peoples face similar struggles with the federal governments in the U.S. and in Canada.