Lewis F. Powell Jr.

One young conservative lawyer would lead a determined fight to maintain Lewis Powell’s blindfolded race neutrality.

King could not accomplish what philosophers and theologians also failed to—distinguishing moral from immoral law in a polarized society.

The Supreme Court doesn't have the last word; the people do. How attorneys pushed back on the flawed 1987 McCleskey decision.

How a landmark Supreme Court decision was shaped by the racist idea that poor children can’t learn.

To understand today’s political battles, you need to know how they began.

The Supreme Court has watered down the policy’s core justification: justice.

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another.

All roads lead to Larry Hammond, Justice Lewis Powell’s law clerk at the time.

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds.

How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.

The mass defection of CEOs of some of the nation’s most powerful corporations from President Trump’s now-defunct Manufacturing Jobs Initiative.

A close look at the grand compromise of 1976.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse.

Conservatives love to bemoan their supposed status as oppressed minorities in universities. But the college campus has long been a key site for the Right.

The conservative backlash to the civil-rights era began immediately — and now it’s nearly complete.

A new book seeks to explain why many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement for white people.

And historians aren't exactly helping in the Harvard case currently before the Supreme Court.

The philosophy that drives the GOP's attacks on government and how it has fueled some of our biggest problems.

A new history of the environmental movement places too much emphasis on famous figures like Rachel Carson and shies away from confronting failures.