Vol. 57 No. 1

Trial Magazine

Books

You must be an AAJ member to access this content.

If you are an active AAJ member or have a Trial Magazine subscription, simply login to view this content.
Not an AAJ member? Join today!

Join AAJ

Books

January 2021

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson
Random House
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
496 pp.; $32

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson uses the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany as examples to illustrate how the United States’ racial history has resulted in a caste system of our own. She argues that America’s caste system is an “infrastructure” that reinforces our racial divisions—“a subconscious code of instructions for maintaining . . . a 400-year-old social order” that dictates which groups have power, command respect, and control resources, among other things. Wilkerson discusses the characteristics that define a caste society, the consequences of living in such a society, and how Americans might move forward to dismantle ours.


His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

By Jon Meacham
Random House
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
368 pp.; $30

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham’s latest book chronicles civil rights icon and longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis’s firsthand experiences of the violence and tumult that impeded the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement. Meacham describes Lewis’s steadfast commitment to nonviolence and how his Christian faith shaped his role as a revered activist. Through beatings and 45 arrests, Lewis’s faith in our nation and its promise persisted. Meacham writes that “John Lewis and his vision . . . changed . . . how America saw itself” and that in doing so helped the nation “gradually expand who’s included when the country speaks of ‘We The People.’”


Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court

By Ilya Shapiro
Regnery Gateway
www.regnery.com
256 pp.; $28.99

Constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute delves into the history of U.S. Supreme Court nominations and the bitter political struggles that often ensue. Confirmation processes have been contentious throughout the nation’s history, he says, but what’s different today is the “larger phenomenon . . . that as government has grown, so have the laws that courts interpret, and their reach over ever more of our lives.” Shapiro writes that courts affect public policy now more than ever, with Supreme Court decisions often involving “massive social controversies.” And these high stakes have fueled partisan battles for control of the Court.The book discusses potential reforms, including term limits, new rules for the confirmation process, and increasing the number of justices.


Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of the DREAM Act and DACA

By Michael A. Olivas
NYU Press
www.nyupress.org
352 pp.; $35

This book covers the history of the DREAM Act—a legislative proposal to grant temporary residency to immigrants who entered the United States as minors—and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which the Obama administration began in response to Congress’s failure to pass immigration reform. University of Houston law professor Michael Olivas discusses how these initiatives have developed over the past 20 years and how the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies have affected those the DREAM Act and DACA were intended to help. Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson’s foreword laments Congress’s failure to advance immigration reform and calls Olivas’s book “an exhaustive and honest examination of where we have gone wrong and where we can still go right.”


The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment

By Ilan Wurman
Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
170 pp.; $19.99

Ilan Wurman discusses how the original meanings of due process, equal protection, and privileges and immunities differ from how the U.S. Supreme Court interprets these Fourteenth Amendment concepts today. He argues, for example, that due process was written as a procedural legal concept without the substantive element often brought to bear in modern Supreme Court analysis. A professor at Arizona State University’s law school, Wurman aims to “uncover the original legal meanings of the Amendment’s key provisions . . . and to show how these concepts . . . solved the general historical problems known to both the Framers and the public of the era.” He finds such an approach not only more reliable but also more likely to be in line with the “meaning and intended effect of the Fourteenth Amendment.”