Justice

From the Framers on, Americans have understood our fundamental law to oppose ownership of persons.

She was a high-schooler in Iowa more than 150 years ago.

The historical context of the amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, Eric Foner argues, are widely misunderstood.

The $2,500 verdict, the largest ever of its kind, offers evidence of the generational impact such awards can have.

What we can learn from him and his legacy.

The fundamental division between “dope” and medicine has always been the race and class of users.

Because cycling was an important mode of transportation for agricultural workers and a popular competitive sport, police saw it as a way to target immigrants.

Japanese American incarceration is the blueprint for today’s migrant detention camps.

Why the Jim Crow-era debate between the African-American leader and a ridiculous, Nazi-loving racist isn’t as famous as Lincoln-Douglas.

Yesterday’s “good" immigrant can turn into tomorrow’s radical.

When birth control was still taboo, early socialists fought to make it accessible to working-class women.

The Supreme Court justice may have been heralded by many of his progressive peers, but the legacy he left behind is far more ambiguous.

Recently unearthed surveillance documents show how the FBI tried to destroy the Poor People’s Movement.

Franklin Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act of 1934 was aimed at John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and other murderous gangsters.

The assault rifle has enabled racists to act alone.

The Manson Family murders weren’t a countercultural revolt. They were about power, entitlement, and Hollywood.

Violence perpetrated by cops doesn’t simply boil down to individual bad actors—it’s also a systemic, judicial failing.

If they return governance to its 19th century roots, they will also do away with courts' ability to review agency action.

An interactive exhibit that explores the events and consequences of the deadliest racial conflict in Arkansas history.

Conservatives like to claim that leftists are opponents of free speech. But that’s nonsense.

A 1974 Supreme Court decision found that school segregation was allowable if it wasn’t being done on purpose.

Let’s get the history of American immigration policy straight.

When modern conservatives associate activists of color with communism, they’re drawing on a racist history that goes back over 100 years.

Immigration activists helped give power to asylum protections once before. They can do it again.

In criminalizing the provision of humanitarian assistance to migrants, we have resurrected the unjust laws of antebellum America.

The story of President Andrew Jackson and Worcester v. Georgia, decided in 1832.

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery.

The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.

Power comes before freedom, not the other way around.

In both cases, false confessions were used against a group of black men with only precarious links to one another.