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The uproar over "legitimate rape" during the 2012 U.S. elections confirms that rape remains a word in flux, subject to political power and social privilege. Redefining Rape describes the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the U.S., through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change.
Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration. Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws fir...
In the first complete account of prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts, dozens of previously unknown cases come to light, revealing the lengths to which the John Adams administration went in order to criminalize dissent. The campaign to prosecute dissenting Americans under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 ignited the first battle over the Bill of Rights. Fearing destructive criticism and “domestic treachery” by Republicans, the administration of John Adams led a determined effort to safeguard the young republic by suppressing the opposition. The acts gave the president unlimited discretion to deport noncitizens and made it a crime to criticize the president, Congress, or the ...
How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court—and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and in...
This book re-examines fundamental assumptions about the American legal profession and the boundaries between "professional" lawyers, "lay" lawyers, and social workers. Putting legal history and women's history in dialogue, it details the history of the origins and development of free legal aid for the poor in the United States.
When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Will got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month. One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about how to rehabilitate young offenders. In a clear-eyed indictment of the juvenile justice system run amok, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein shows that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isola...
Recovers a contested, evolving tradition of conservative constitutional argument that shaped the past and is bidding to make the future.
George Fisher seeks the moral roots of America's antidrug regime and challenges claims that early antidrug laws arose from racial animus. Those moral roots trace to early Christian sexual strictures, which later influenced Puritan condemnations of drunkenness, and ultimately shaped the early American drug war. Early laws against opium dens, cocaine, and cannabis rarely rose from racial strife, but sprang from the traditional moral censure of intoxication and perceived threats to respectable white women and youth. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.
This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich. With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth pries open the inner workings of professional licensing boards, showing how they erect arbitrary barriers to work, corruptly influence markets for routine services such as hairdressing, and tolerate bad actors in high-stakes arenas like medicine and law. The Licensing Racket is a call for reform and, where needed, abolition.