Social Movements & the Law

"After decades of union decline and rising inequality, an inspiring wave of workplace organizing--from Starbucks stores to Amazon warehouses to southern auto factories--has thrust unionization into the national spotlight. By analyzing this surge and telling the stories of the courageous workers driving it forward, We Are the Union makes a case for how to overcome business as usual in both corporate America and organized labor. Eric Blanc shows that recent struggles have developed a new organizing model, worker-to-worker unionism, which builds scalable power by giving rank-and-filers an unprecedented degree of leadership. Through digital tools and ambitious campaigns, young worker leaders are turning the labor movement back into a movement--and they're winning. Rigorously researched and compellingly written, We Are the Union illustrates how this new grassroots approach can exponentially grow the power of working people to overcome economic exploitation, racial injustice, and authoritarianism at work and beyond."--Publisher's description.

"The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America's booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one. In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country's "Black Mecca" after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children--and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation's working homeless. Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation's hidden homeless--omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem"--

"Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man's leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race. With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer's training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences--and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers. At the heart of 'Wrongful Birth' is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child 'comes out Black'; 'Bodies in Law' explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And 'Hot Cheeto Girl' examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny. In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide"--

"From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse"--

"On Sex and Gender focuses on three sequential and consequential questions: What is sex--as opposed to gender? How does sex matter in our everyday lives? And how should it be reflected in law and policy? All three are front-and-center in American politics: They are included in both of the major parties' political platforms. They are the subject of ongoing litigation in the federal courts and of highly contentious legislation on Capitol Hill. And they are a pivotal issue in the culture war between left and right playing out on battlegrounds from campuses and school boards to op-ed pages and corporate handbooks. Doriane Coleman challenges both sides to chart a new way forward. She argues that denying biological sex would have profound and detrimental effects on women's equal opportunity and on the health and welfare of society generally. Structural sexism needed to be dismantled--a true achievement of feminism and an ongoing fight--but sex blindness is not the next step forward. This book is a clear guide for reasonable Americans on the issue of gender and sex--something everyone is terrified to discuss. Coleman shows equally that the science is settled but there is a middle ground on protecting both women's rights and trans rights. She livens her narrative with a sequence of portraits of exceptional human beings who have fought to advance the cause of equality from legal pioneers like Myra Bradwell and Ketanji Brown Jackson to champion athletes like Caster Semenya and Cate Campbell to civil rights giants like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Pauli Murray. Above all, Coleman reminds us that sex--the male and the female body--is good for three reasons. Sex is good for procreation, it's good for sexual pleasure, and it's good for something in our natural lives to be beautiful"--

Long Beach gay trials : a history of injustice-book

"A leading political scientist examines the dramatic rise in violent extremism around the globe and sounds the alarm on the increasing likelihood of a second civil war in the United States. Political violence rips apart several towns in southwest Texas. A far-right militia plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for treason. An armed mob of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists storms the U.S. Capitol. Are these isolated incidents? Or is this the start of something bigger? Barbara F. Walter has spent her career studying civil conflict in places like Iraq and Sri Lanka, but now she has become increasingly worried about her own country. Perhaps surprisingly, both autocracies and healthy democracies are largely immune from civil war; it's the countries in the middle ground that are most vulnerable. And this is where more and more countries, including the United States, are finding themselves today. Over the last two decades, the number of active civil wars around the world has almost doubled. Walter reveals the warning signs--where wars tend to start, who initiates them, what triggers them--and why some countries tip over into conflict while others remain stable. Drawing on the latest international research and lessons from over twenty countries, Walter identifies the crucial risk factors, from democratic backsliding to factionalization and the politics of resentment. A civil war today won't look like America in the 1860s, Russia in the 1920s, or Spain in the 1930s. It will begin with sporadic acts of violence and terror, accelerated by social media. It will sneak up on us and leave us wondering how we could have been so blind. In this urgent and insightful book, Walter redefines civil war for a new age, providing the framework we need to confront the danger we now face--and the knowledge to stop it before it's too late"--

"Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother's stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother's health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. "Tell them about Papa Renty," she would say. It was her mother's last wish. Thus begins one woman's remarkable commitment to document that story. Her discovery of an eighteenth-century daguerreotype, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read "Renty, Congo." All at once, Lanier knew she was staring at the ancestor her mother told her so much about-Papa Renty. In a compelling story covering more than a decade of her own research, Lanier takes us on her quest to prove her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty's that pits her in a legal battle against one of the most powerful institutions in the country, Harvard University. The question is, who has claim to the stories, artifacts, and remnants of America's stained history-the institutions who acquired and housed them for generations, or the descendants who have survived? From These Roots is not only a historical record of one woman's lineage but a call to justice that fights for all those demanding to reclaim, honor, and lay to rest the remains of mishandled lives and memories"--

"Since its acquisition by the US in 1898, Puerto Rico has served as a testing ground for the most aggressive and exploitative US economic, political, and social policies. The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane Maria, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests. Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization." --

"This volume presents essays evaluating the similarities and differences between the legal, political, ethical, and practical landscapes confronted by the death penalty abolition movement at the time of the Furman v. Georgia decision and subsequent reversal and those confronted by the same movement today"--

"A history of post-Brown school desegregation in Detroit, with a focus on Milliken v. Bradley"--

"This is a book about hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border"--;Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojoas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community's struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state's neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region--a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women's active participation and leadership, a women's political subjectivity has emerged Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility. This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border"--

"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place"--Provided by publisher.

Written By: Amy Shaw, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Georgia State University May 2025 Observances & Conferences Jewish American Heritage Month Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacifi…

Title IX aims to prevent sex-based discrimination in education, but different administrations have taken different interpretations of what that means and what constitutes discrimination.

Three former Memphis officers have been acquitted of all state charges, including second-degree murder, in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols after he ran away from a traffic stop.

The Democratic controlled cities of Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, adopted new city flags this week that show support for LGBTQ+ people in defiance of new laws passed by their states’ Republican-controlled Legislatures.

2,658 likes, 46 comments - chasestrangio on May 7, 2025: "Yesterday the Supreme Court allowed Trump’s sweeping and animus-driven ban on open trans military service to go into effect. In a 6-3 order with no reasoning or written opinions, the Court opened the door to the mass expulsion of trans people from the military. This is a devastating development in Trump-related litigation but I wanted to also offer some context about the legal standards in military litigation where the courts afford wide latitude to the federal executive. That does not mean this Court is not ready to green light many forms of discrimination and executive power grabs, they are. But I wanted to at least calibrate what this particular action means in light of decades of terrible precedent around the military. When we think about concepts like “restoring the rule of law” and living under “a police state” it feels important to remember that the rule of law is itself violent and that many people have been constructively if not explicitly living under a police state here for decades and longer. Each action from each branch of government builds on frameworks that were built over centuries and our resistance will continue no matter what this or any government tries to do to us. We are undeniably facing many existential threats and also we retain our ability to love and care for each other and mobilize every day.".

FIND YOUR CONGRESS PEOPLE: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member type in your zip code Look at results for senators and house reps Call them!! Trump 2025 Executive Orders list by Category As of 2/5/2025; updated 2/11/2025; updated 2/12/2025; updated 2/21/2025; updated 3/3/2025; upd...

The Pentagon ordered military educational institutions to pull and review any books that promote what it called "divisive concepts and gender ideology" on Friday, in the latest move from President Donald Trump's administration against diversity, equity and inclusion.

A new poll shows a majority of U.S. adults disapprove of President Donald Trump’s handling of issues related to colleges and universities, as his Republican administration ramps up threats to cut federal funding unless schools comply with his political agenda.

From Politico: President Donald Trump continued a firing spree at the Library of Congress on Saturday when he dismissed the top copyright official in the nation — a position traditionally overseen by the legislative branch. The White House contacted Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter Saturday afternoon informing her that her job leading the U.S. Copyright […]

Ed. Note: We will update this report with additional media coverage and statements as they become available Recent Additions (Last Update 5:30pm; May 12) ALISE Statement On the Dismissal of Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress The Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) strongly condemns this unprecedented action. Dr. Hayden, the first woman […]

The reasonable accommodation mandate was intended to ensure access for people with disabilities. Yet some people with disabilities who are eligible for and in n

President Donald Trump's onetime defense attorney has been appointed acting librarian of Congress. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche replaces longtime librarian Carla Hayden, whom the White House fired last week amid criticism from some conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and its members are deeply disappointed in the administration’s decision to terminate Dr. Carla Hayden as Librarian of Congress,” said Andrew K. Pace,...

A new analysis by the National Women's Law Center captures how President Trump's mass job cuts are chipping away at the diversity of the federal workforce.

A new policy in Hennepin County, Minnesota, that allows prosecutors to consider racial identity in plea deals has led to a probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.

WaPo: Justice Department lawyers defending the Trump administration’s policies are encountering mounting criticism and frustration from federal judges, a sign of deepening tension between the executive branch and courts weighing its aggressive uses of power. In recent hearings and rulings, … Continue reading “Justice Department lawyers face skeptical judges upset by ‘shoddy work'” →

President Donald Trump’s latest executive order about “sanctuary jurisdictions” has begun a second round of legal battles over the constitutionality of federal government sanctions against state and local governments.