Justice

Even as the civil rights revolution brought significant gains to Black residents of cities, the story was very different in rural places.

Opposition to British policy was justified. Destroying 342 crates of tea worth nearly $2 million in today’s money wasn’t.

The Exorcist in 1973 and 2023.

America’s feminists felt confident when the Equal Rights Amendment was put before Congress 100 years ago this week. For a century, it’s failed to be enacted.

This new biopic about the socialist organizer Bayard Rustin stops at the March on Washington. What is it leaving out?

The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?

There was really only one big difference between liberal drug warriors and conservative ones.

Confronting segregation as Black urbanites' fight for access and equality in northern cinemas.

After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?

Judge the author of the “Feminine Mystique” not by the gains she made, but by her experience.

How fascists and authoritarians have used antisemitic conspiracy theories to harm Jewish communities and undermine democracy.

When we try to recover the “original meaning” of constitutional amendments, we begin with deeply engrained premises about the nature of what we're looking for.

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

Modern surveillance policing is rooted in approaches adopted a century ago.

Despite Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a Colorado state judge stretches the word “officer,” permitting him to remain on the state’s ballot.

One of the biggest challenges for the NYPD, especially in the years following the turn of the twentieth century, was policing the newcomer immigrants.

John Brown and the Secret Six—the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferry—confronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?

The 1898 Wilmington massacre overthrew the elected government in the majority-Black city, killed many Black residents and torched a Black-run newspaper.

Originalism is all the rage on the right, but a gun case at the Supreme Court is exposing its absurdity—even to the conservative justices.

Environmental radicalism, left and right.

Government, wrote Alexander Hamilton, should substitute “the mild influence” of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”

The civil-rights mastermind was sidelined by his own movement. Now he’s back in the spotlight. What can we learn from his strategies of resistance?

A new film finally spotlights Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights activist who organized the 1963 March on Washington.

Wherever we find the state engaged in potentially lethal repression, we find prison.

Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker ideas.

The UAW's patient organizing cemented an alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

Martin Scorsese's new film revisits the murders of wealthy Osages in Oklahoma in the 1920s

A new biography examines the life of the abolitionist, newspaper editor, activist, and globetrotter.

Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement.

Despite depictions of the Underground Railroad, escaping over land was almost impossible in the South. Thousands of enslaved people found allies on the water.