Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants-whether innocent or guilty-to take a plea deal. Punishment Without Trial showcases how plea bargaining has undermined justice at every turn and across socioeconomic and racial divides. It forces the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is dogging our jails and pun­ishing citizens.

In recent years, the high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others have brought much-needed attention to the pervasiveness of police misconduct. Yet it remains nearly impossible to hold police accountable for abuses of power—the decisions of the Supreme Court, state and local governments, and policy makers have, over decades, made the police all but untouchable. In Shielded, University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Joanna Schwartz exposes the myriad ways in which our legal system protects police at all costs.

Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year.

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.

The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, a form of punishment that ruins lives and makes a return to prison more likely. With the authority of a prominent legal scholar and the practical insights gained through on-the-ground work on criminal-justice reform, Rachel Barkow explains how dangerous it is to base criminal-justice policy on the whims of the electorate, which puts judges, sheriffs, and politicians in office.

Americans wage many of today’s fiercest policy debates and culture wars over constitutional meaning. It’s because constitutional law is so fundamental to our democracy that law schools across the country teach the subject. It's the area of law that determines what federal and state governments are permitted to do, and what rights you have as an individual citizen of the US. Here, you'll get the same accessible, well-rounded introduction to constitutional law as a typical law student - but with the added benefit of noted constitutional scholar Eric Berger's brilliant insights.

From an award-winning Fortune reporter, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals the life-threatening dangers posed by globalization - The Jungle for pharmaceuticals.

Law professor James J. Duane became a viral sensation thanks to a 2008 lecture outlining the reasons why you should never agree to answer questions from the police - especially if you are innocent and wish to stay out of trouble with the law. In this timely, relevant, and pragmatic new book, he expands on that presentation, offering a vigorous defense of every citizen's constitutionally protected right to avoid self-incrimination.

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread - all with the support of judges and politicians.

Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, he argues, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws both in our justice system and in human nature. Bharara uses the many illustrative anecdotes and case histories from his storied, formidable career - the successes as well as the failures - to shed light on the realities of the legal system and the consequences of taking action.

In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write a true story of Southern Gothic horror - of two innocent men wrongly convicted of vicious crimes and the legally condoned failures that allowed it to happen. Balko and Carrington will shine a light on the institutional and professional failures that allowed this tragic, astonishing story to happen, identify where it may have happened elsewhere, and show how to prevent it from happening again.

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

Ascending to the leadership role of US Attorney for the Southern District, which includes Manhattan and several counties to the north, is a capstone to any legal career: it entails guiding a team of the best lawyers in America in selecting and winning cases that often have global import. Geoffrey Berman was honored to be tapped for the job by Donald Trump in 2018. The manner in which Trump had dispatched his predecessor Preet Bharara was troubling, but the institution was fabled for its independence. Surely he could manage.

In the past thirty years alone, more than 2,800 innocent American prisoners—their combined sentences surpassing 25,000 years—have been exonerated and freed after being condemned for crimes they did not commit. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a fraction of the actual number of persons wrongfully accused and convicted over the same period.

Not since The Thin Blue Line has there been a true-crime saga as engrossing as Making a Murderer. Captivating audiences across demographic lines, it made Steven Avery a household name and thrust defense attorney Jerome F. Buting - and his fight against America's dysfunctional criminal justice system - into the spotlight. In Illusion of Justice, Buting uses the Avery case as a springboard to examine the shaky integrity of our law enforcement and legal systems, which he has witnessed firsthand for nearly four decades.

An insider’s account of the infamous Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal that scapegoated black employees for problems caused by an education reform movement that is increasingly a proxy for corporate greed.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: The country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment.

Early one morning in the summer of 1999, authorities in the tiny West Texas town of Tulia began a roundup of suspected drug dealers. By the time the sweep was done, over 40 people had been arrested and one of every five black adults in town was behind bars, all accused of dealing cocaine to the same undercover officer, Tom Coleman.

On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, was bombed, killing four young girls. Who were the perpetrators? Due to reluctant witnesses and racial prejudice, the FBI closed the case without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bending Toward Justice is a detailed account of this key moment in our national struggle for equality and the long road to prosecuting those responsible for the tragedy, related by an author who played a major role in the investigation.

In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case.

In Tough Cases, judges from different kinds of courts in different parts of the country write about the case that proved most difficult for them to decide. Some of these cases received international attention: the Elián González case in which Judge Jennifer Bailey had to decide whether to return a seven-year-old boy to his father in Cuba after his mother drowned trying to bring the child to the United States, or the Terri Schiavo case in which Judge George Greer had to decide whether to withdraw life support from a woman in a vegetative state over the wishes of her parents.

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop, the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.

On a Friday night in March 1981, Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to retaliate after a largely black jury could not reach a verdict in a trial involving a black man accused of the murder of a white man. The two Klansmen found 19-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone.

On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, the prisoners negotiated with officials for improved conditions during the four long days and nights that followed. On September 13, the state abruptly sent hundreds of heavily armed troopers and correction officers to retake the prison by force. Their gunfire killed 39 men - hostages as well as prisoners.

“Free the West Memphis Three!” - maybe you’ve heard the phrase, but do you know why their story is so alarming? Do you know the facts? The guilty verdicts handed out to three Arkansas teens in a horrific capital murder case were popular in their home state - even upheld on appeal. But after two HBO documentaries called attention to the witch-hunt atmosphere at the trials, artists and other supporters raised concerns about the accompanying lack of evidence.

New York Times best-selling author T. J. English, the acclaimed master chronicler of the Irish Mob in America, offers a front row seat at the trial of one of the most notorious gangsters of all - Whitey Bulger - and pulls back the veil to expose a breathtaking history of corruption and malfeasance.

Fearless lawyer, feminist, activist, television and radio commentator, warrior, advocate, and winner, Gloria Allred is all of these things and more. Voted by her peers as one of the best lawyers in America, and described by Time as "one of the nation's most effective advocates of family rights and feminist causes", Allred has devoted her career to fighting for civil rights across boundaries of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and social class.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.