Social Movements & the Law

They care deeply and can't be fired. Retired librarians are bringing experience and passion to the cause of intellectual freedom. With advocacy skills training and opportunities to mentor, retirees could become even more powerful assets.

Looking for something fun or interesting to read over winter break? Why not try a book recommendation from a fellow member of the Northwestern Law community, including several librarians at the PLR…

Librarians in at least three states are asking the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to intervene after they were fired for refusing to ban books.

Not all libraries track checkouts, and there isn't one definitive national list. But this year lots of people checked out Lessons in Chemistry, Prince Harry's memoir Spare, and Colleen Hoover's books.

Native communities see clean energy as a way to remedy some of the abuses depicted in the new Martin Scorsese film, "Killers of the Flower Moon."

By Allan Cho (Follow us on LinkedIn) As part of the Visible Minority Librarians of Canada Network (ViMLoC), I’ve participated in its mentorship program and have met many talented and eager ear…

Systemic racism is a reality in Canada. At many junctures in life, a person’s access to opportunities and fair treatment will be affected by their race, skin colour, or indigineity. The legal profession, in order to do its essential work in our society, must recognize and confront systemic racism. So far, most formal efforts to […]

December 5, 2023 – Today Stanford Law School’s Filing Fairness Project announced the launch of its Filing Fairness Toolkit, a first-of-its-kind, i

Invisible illness and disability; Latino USA story, The Archivists; Toolkit for Program Challenges; Kellogg Canada's EDI efforts threated by boycott

When artist Richard Phillips carefully hangs watercolor paintings in his home, he becomes mentally transported into the nature scenes that appear on his canvas.

Leaders from the Indigenous Resilience Center shared at the One Water Summit about their efforts to work with tribal communities on water audits, filtration systems, and other solutions.

All The Only Ones is a new 3-part series from NPR's Embedded. Host Laine Kaplan-Levenson unearths the little known and often neglected history of trans youth in America. We follow the lives of young transgender people today and travel back in time to the turn of the 20th century to meet some of the earliest trans youth documented in American history. Launching on November 2.

"Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons-not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility"--

"In Supreme Bias, Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand, present for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of race and gender at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Drawing on their deep knowledge of the confirmation hearings, as well as rich new qualitative and quantitative evidence, the authors highlight how the women and people of color who have sat before the Committee have faced a significantly different confirmation process than their white, male colleagues. Despite being among the most qualified and well-credentialed lawyers of their respective generations, female nominees and nominees of color face more skepticism of their professional competence, are subjected to stereotype-based questioning, and are more frequently interrupted and described in less positive terms by senators. In addition to revealing the disturbing extent to which race and gender bias exists even at the highest echelon of U.S. legal power, this book also provides concrete suggestions for how that bias can be reduced in the future"--

The last decade has seen significant changes in global attitudes, policies and practices that impact the lives of trans people, but the world of sport has been slow to follow these initiatives. Contributors to this book document the formidable social-cultural and legal challenges facing trans athletes, particularly girls and women, at the global, national, and local levels, in contexts ranging from school sport to international competition. They demonstrate how proponents of trans exclusion rely on flawed or inconclusive science, selectively employed to support their purported goal of 'protecting women's sport'. Politicians in the US, UK, and elsewhere who have shown little interest in women or in sport exploit the issue to advance broader conservative agendas, while hostile mainstream and social media coverage exacerbates the problem. Bringing insights from sociology, philosophy, science and law, contributors present cogent analyses of these developments and explore the way forward, providing thoughtful and original recommendations for changes to policies and practices that are inclusive, innovative and democratic. --

"From the highest-ranking whistleblower in the history of the NYPD, a political memoir that exposes the brokenness of policing from both outside and inside the system During the workday, Edwin Raymond is on the beat as a ranked lieutenant in the New York Police Department. When the uniform comes off, he takes on a very different role: the lead plaintiff in the largest-ever civil rights lawsuit against the very police force he serves. This is the true story of one of our country's most important whistleblowers against police injustice, told in his own words. Raised in a poverty-stricken, largely immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn and driven toward law enforcement by the hope of being a positive influence in his community, Raymond quickly learned that the problem with policing is a lot deeper than merely "a few bad apples"--the entire mechanism is set up to ensure that racial profiling is rewarded, and there are weighty consequences for cops who don't play along. Offering a rare, often shocking view of American policing through the eyes of an insider to the system, Raymond pulls back the curtain on the many injustices woven into the NYPD's training, data, and practices--all of which have been repackaged and repurposed by police departments across America. At once revelatory and galvanizing, An Inconvenient Cop is a whistleblower account unlike any other--a book that courageously bears witness to and exposes institutional violence, all while presenting a vision of radical hope, making the case for a world in which the police's responsibility is to the people, not to their arrest numbers" --

"Offers a novel contribution to immigration legal scholarship by rewriting Supreme Court immigration law opinions from a critical immigration legal theory lens. Contests fundamental presumptions in doctrinal immigration law and shows how entrenched system of power, alongside racism, sexism, and stereotypes, have marred the immigration law landscape"--

This blog post is a discussion of the history of the movement and passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

Chauvin was stabbed and seriously injured by another inmate inside a federal prison in Tucson, Ariz., according to officials.

Some librarians who've been fired as they take a stand against discrimination and banning books are turning to a federal civil-rights enforcement agency for help.

"David Theo Goldberg analyzes the claims expressed in the attacks on critical race theory (CRT). He punctures the demonization of CRT, uncovering who is orchestrating it, funding the assault, and distributing the message. The book illustrates the enduring nature of structural racism, even as a conservative insistence on colorblindness serves to silence the possibility of doing anything about it. Goldberg exposes the political aims and effects of the vitriolic attacks. The upshot of CRT's targeting, he argues, has been to unleash racisms anew and to stymie any attempt to fight them, all with the aim of protecting white minority rule" --

"Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power contends that the deep economic inequality and racial disparities that Americans take for granted have been quietly held in place by the four-decade campaign of racialized state violence known as mass incarceration. Tasseli McKay presents detailed evidence that the steep direct costs of mass-scale imprisonment are far overshadowed by its hidden costs and harms, many of which have been kept out of sight by women's invisible labor. Finding that the economic value of the damages to Black individuals, families, and communities totals $7.13 trillion--a sum equivalent to 85 percent of the current Black-White household wealth gap--McKay points to the urgency and feasibility of reparation and to the possibilities that lie beyond it"--Provided by publisher.

More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise, based on the broadly shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. In practice, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence. This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy--Publisher's description.

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, "a strikingly fresh cultural critic" (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society--state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, womens rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy--alongside more individually personalized matters: can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting? In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publications "Work Friend" columnist, she reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of Roxane Gays best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics--politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more--with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gays devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.

Since the early 1960s, incarcerated Muslims have used legal action to establish their rights to religious freedom behind bars and improve the conditions of their incarceration. Inspired by Islamic principles of justice and equality, these efforts have played a critical role in safeguarding the civil rights not only of imprisoned Muslims but of all those confined to carceral settings. In this sweeping book����-the first to examine this history in depth-SpearIt writes a missing chapter in the history of Islam in America while illuminating new perspectives on the role of religious expression and experience in the courtroom.

"The first comprehensive history of probation and parole-and a provocative and compelling argument for abolishing both-from the former Probation Commissioner of New York City"--

Injustice, Inc. : how America's justice system commodifies children and the poor-book