In The Secret Life of Copyright, copyright law meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo as the book examines how copyright law unexpectedly perpetuates inequalities along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines while undermining progress in the arts. Drawing on numerous case studies, the book argues that, despite their purported neutrality, key doctrines governing copyrights-such as authorship, derivative rights, fair use, and immunity from First Amendment scrutiny-systematically disadvantage i...

Middle Easterners: Sometimes White, Sometimes Not - an article by John TehranianThe Middle Eastern question lies at the heart of the most pressing issues of our time: the war in Iraq and on terrorism, the growing tension between preservation of our national security and protection of our civil rights, and the debate over immigration, assimilation, and our national identity. Yet paradoxically, little attention is focused on our domestic Middle Eastern population and its place in Amer...

A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police—from the bestselling author of The DivideNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POSTOn July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illeg...

In Human Rights from Below, Jim Ife shows how human rights and community development are problematic terms but powerful ideals, and that each is essential for understanding and practising the other. Ife contests that practitioners - advocates, activists, workers and volunteers - can better empower and protect communities when human rights are treated as more than just a specialist branch of law or international relations, and that human rights can be better realised when community developm...

Like advances in many fields, those involving genetics bring both benefits and dangers to society. Among the promised benefits is the ability to identify health issues earlier than is now the case and the improve the prospects of successful prevention and treatment. In addition, forensic applications of genetic technologies have proven a powerful tool of criminal investigation. The dangers of genetic technology lie in its ability to provide extensive and highly sensitive information about...

The struggle for racial equality in the North has been a footnote in most books about civil rights in America. Now this monumental new work from one of the most brilliant historians of his generation sets the record straight. Sweet Land of Liberty is an epic, revelatory account of the abiding quest for justice in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South.Thomas Sugrue’s panoramic view s...

The law affects us all, and even your most basic day-to-day choices and actions have legal implications. Yet few people have much knowledge of the law or understand complicated legal terminology – and lawyers’ fees are beyond many people’s reach. This book will provide you with the necessary information on a wide range of legal issues that may impact on your daily life – at work, in the home, on the road, in the marketplace, and in the courtroom.Written by experts specifically for ...

Written from the perspective of someone who was shot by police, and who advocates for justice for himself and the police officer killed.Mumia gives a voice to African Americans whose lives have been taken by police activity.Mumia names our current political moment in order to transform it.The national Black Lives Matter movement continues to grow and intensify in response to news of police killings of innocent people of color. Mumia is in many ways the moral, intell...

In 1981, decades before mainstream America elected Barack Obama, James Chase became the first African American mayor of Spokane, Washington, with the overwhelming support of a majority-white electorate. Chase’s win failed to capture the attention of historians—as had the century-long evolution of the black community in Spokane. In Black Spokane: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest, Dwayne A. Mack corrects this oversight—and recovers a crucial chapter in the history o...

An English court in 1736 described rape as an accusation “easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent. ”To prove the crime, the law required a woman to physically resist, to put up a “hue and cry,” as evidence of her unwillingness. Beginning in the 1970s, however, feminist and victim-advocacy groups began changing attitudes toward rape so the crime is now seen as violent in itself: the legal definition of rape now includ...

Few individuals have had as great an impact on the law--both its practice and its history--as A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, he has distinguished himself over the decades both as a professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, and as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals. But Judge Higginbotham is perhaps best known as an authority on racism in America: not the least important achieveme...

Loren Miller was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960s and successfully fought discrimination in housing and education. Alongside Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued two landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decisions effectively abolished racially restrictive housing covenants. One of these cases, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), is taught in nearly every American law school today. Later, the two men pla...