Justice

Tracing John Lewis’s lifelong fight for democracy and inclusion.

The question of what Jefferson meant by “all men” has defined American law and politics for too long.

Thousands of African Americans fought for the British—then fled the United States to avoid a return to enslavement.

The leading arguments in support of Black voting rights were race-conscious at their core.

In trying to shut the door on race-conscious affirmative action, he may have quietly left another affirmative action door wide open.

Who gets to move freely in California’s auto insurance system?

Trump's NSPM-7 is a pivotal policy endangering free expression in the United States.

Island Trees v. Pico tested student rights, free expression and the limits of school boards.

A memoir explores L.A.'s political culture after the Rodney King beating.

A habitual drunkard’s journey through guardianship and the asylum.

The use of the punitive tactic exploded a century after US officials had deemed it too torturous.

Revisiting the lessons of Allan Bérubé’s 1990 history of queer solders during World War II.

Chief Justice John Roberts has now overseen 20 years of increasingly illiberal rulings by the Supreme Court.

Using the antiquated language of "vagrancy," Trump Administration officials are tapping into a long history of policing.

Redford’s legacy as an environmental activist and his 1992 film "Sneakers" reveal his foresight on climate, politics, and surveillance.

History suggests that uncivil discourse, while dangerous at times, has always been a defining feature of American democracy.

The FBI reads James Baldwin.

Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech.

Firearm ownership meant something very different when the United States was founded.

A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution.

A Black socialist magazine urges solidarity and action in 1919.

Historian Jane Smith understands her childhood differently after discovering that her father had been pushed out of his profession during the Red Scare.

One of the most famous episodes of school desegregation was actually just the starting point for a half-century struggle.

He started in the 1930s farmworker camps that inspired John Steinbeck’s novels and went on to pioneer methodical tactics that transformed American organizing.

The outcome to these three connected events remains ambivalent. Six decades later, many of the issues animating the moratorium remain as relevant as ever.

DC’s crackdown is just the latest in a long war on being poor and disabled in public.

“Horses were a part of the daily fabric of life for many enslaved Black people.”

The emotional roller coaster that changed the course of the Civil Rights Movement.

Churches, city officials and activists assisted migrants fleeing the violent conditions created by U.S. proxy wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

In 1966, police shot a young Puerto Rican man. What followed created a blueprint for a new kind of solidarity.