Law & Justice

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...

The book opens with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, because it so dramatically illustrates the consequences of constitutional fundamentalism. In Charlottesville, we saw the collision of...

This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves? Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards, and who can’t be trusted to do a good job or refrain from lying, cheating and stealing—unless given the right “incentives.”

The book—really an extended essay—argues that Stalin’s mass killings in the 1930s should be classified as “genocide.” The book suggests that the definition of genocide, as taken from the work of...

Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...

The First Amendment says that “freedom of speech” shall not be abridged. The Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment unquestionably covers Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Arnold Schoenberg’s music, and...

This book explores the concept of “animus” in the law of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Over the last thirty years, the Supreme Court has decided several important equal protection...

Chapter 4, “From Market Share to Mindshare,” is about the new discipline of neuromarketing. The ability to monitor consumers’ biological responses to commercials in real time has led to more...

The book examines three cases: the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-6, at the end of the Second World War; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at...

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...

Clara Foltz was a leader of two great movements: for women’s rights and for public defense. The book conceptualizes these two as connected in her person as well as in...

Many studies of religious liberty follow one of two paths. One essentially involves a study of ideas, and tries to explain how great thinkers, like St. Augustine, either justified the...

After years of teaching courses about immigration and administrative law and thinking out loud with my students about the structure of the executive branch, I could not explain why the...

An accomplished artist, Brooke VanDevelder, worked with me to create customized illustrations that serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s three sections. If a potential reader is just browsing,...

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

Pages 2 through 5 state what the book is about, its objectives, the historical significance of the story, and my role in it. Allow me to stitch together some of...

The Embattled Vote explains why Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. The book is more relevant than ever after the Supreme Court sanctioned partisan gerrymandering in...

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...

My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...

This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become ...

How much competition exists on the business side of live entertainment has always determined the quality and price of what reaches the stage, and how the artists and crew get treated. Vaudeville, a century of commercial theater, and today's arena tours — why vaudeville died, why a theatrical syndicate should have been prosecuted as the cartel it was, and why a monopoly had to be broken up in the 1950s.

One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014). Why...

Crossing Hitler is a biography of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who devoted his legal practice to fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the late 1920s and 1930s, as...

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

Most of us don’t understand the profound impact copyright law has on our lives. Most have a sense that copyright protection should be designed to incentivize new creations, but we...

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991. The first case involved...

In a sense, Eurolegalism is a book about how the EU attempts to govern and what impact it has on its member countries. Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly...

Psychopathy Unmasked is a book about “psychopaths.” But it’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill account that repeats the well-worn story of violent people naturally disposed to wreak havoc in our society. Instead,...

Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment is necessary and ought to be...

I originally got started on this topic as a young idealist then as a neophyte teacher. While in law school, I interned in the United States government, out of the...

End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America unexpectedly faded away. Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height. Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences...

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

The book criticizes an attitude I call “global legalism,” the faith or hope that international law can solve the word’s problems even though the world is a largely anarchical place,...

This book makes a strong argument against the widespread perception, inside and outside the legal profession, that law is somehow an inanimate set of abstract rules which are the product...

Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate...

Traitors in wartime have a long history. During World War Two, both Allied and Axis governments used enemy nationals to broadcast propaganda. When the war ended, the victors prosecuted a...

My interest in the concept of obscenity grew out of a law school course on the topic of the rhetoric, law and culture. One of the readings was Sophocles’ play...

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

When Richard Newman died in Los Angeles in 1997, his body was taken to the county coroner’s office for a routine autopsy. Two years later, Newman’s father learned that the...

Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...

This book originated in the search for the origins of contemporary skepticism on the universality of human rights—a skepticism exemplified by the 1990s controversy on “Asian Values,” and more recent...

Birthright sets out to recount, for the first time, the real-life saga of James Annesley, which not only captivated eighteenth-century Britain but inspired five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s...

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores combines people, history, and law. The book is composed of six stories about early Americans and how brushes with the law affected everyday life. If the...

The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...

Constitutional Cliffhangers is about six situations in which the Constitution’s provisions for selecting, replacing, and punishing presidents are seriously vulnerable. Each chapter starts out with a fictional scenario that dramatizes one...

At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...

Animals as Persons can be understood as a reaction to and rejection of the paradigm of animal welfare that has dominated our thinking about the moral status of nonhuman animals...

Religion and the belief in God have made a major comeback. From the fundamentalist turn in predominantly Islamic polities to the spread of Catholicism and Pentecostalism in the global south,...

The Justice Cascadeprovides an overview and an evaluation of one of the most important changes in global politics: the rise of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations. In it,...

My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In...

Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression. But is that right? In The Will...

The United States Constitution laid the groundwork for the intellectual property regime—giving Congress the power: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to...

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is about the messy, uncertain process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, and the quasi-judicial ritual that South Africa used to help accomplish such...

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...

At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a...

The Birthright Lottery proposes a new way of thinking about the intergenerational transfer of citizenship as a special kind of property inheritance. It emphasizes the significance of citizenship – perhaps...

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...

The book opens with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, because it so dramatically illustrates the consequences of constitutional fundamentalism. In Charlottesville, we saw the collision of...

This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves? Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards, and who can’t be trusted to do a good job or refrain from lying, cheating and stealing—unless given the right “incentives.”

The book—really an extended essay—argues that Stalin’s mass killings in the 1930s should be classified as “genocide.” The book suggests that the definition of genocide, as taken from the work of...

Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...

The First Amendment says that “freedom of speech” shall not be abridged. The Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment unquestionably covers Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Arnold Schoenberg’s music, and...

This book explores the concept of “animus” in the law of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Over the last thirty years, the Supreme Court has decided several important equal protection...

Chapter 4, “From Market Share to Mindshare,” is about the new discipline of neuromarketing. The ability to monitor consumers’ biological responses to commercials in real time has led to more...

The book examines three cases: the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-6, at the end of the Second World War; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at...

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...

Clara Foltz was a leader of two great movements: for women’s rights and for public defense. The book conceptualizes these two as connected in her person as well as in...

Many studies of religious liberty follow one of two paths. One essentially involves a study of ideas, and tries to explain how great thinkers, like St. Augustine, either justified the...

After years of teaching courses about immigration and administrative law and thinking out loud with my students about the structure of the executive branch, I could not explain why the...

An accomplished artist, Brooke VanDevelder, worked with me to create customized illustrations that serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s three sections. If a potential reader is just browsing,...

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

Pages 2 through 5 state what the book is about, its objectives, the historical significance of the story, and my role in it. Allow me to stitch together some of...

The Embattled Vote explains why Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. The book is more relevant than ever after the Supreme Court sanctioned partisan gerrymandering in...

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...

My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...

This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become ...

How much competition exists on the business side of live entertainment has always determined the quality and price of what reaches the stage, and how the artists and crew get treated. Vaudeville, a century of commercial theater, and today's arena tours — why vaudeville died, why a theatrical syndicate should have been prosecuted as the cartel it was, and why a monopoly had to be broken up in the 1950s.

One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014). Why...

Crossing Hitler is a biography of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who devoted his legal practice to fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the late 1920s and 1930s, as...

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

Most of us don’t understand the profound impact copyright law has on our lives. Most have a sense that copyright protection should be designed to incentivize new creations, but we...

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

My book is a stark but comprehensive look at what really happened following the discovery of two seemingly unrelated cases of murder near Phoenix, Arizona, in 1991. The first case involved...

In a sense, Eurolegalism is a book about how the EU attempts to govern and what impact it has on its member countries. Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly...

Psychopathy Unmasked is a book about “psychopaths.” But it’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill account that repeats the well-worn story of violent people naturally disposed to wreak havoc in our society. Instead,...

Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment is necessary and ought to be...

I originally got started on this topic as a young idealist then as a neophyte teacher. While in law school, I interned in the United States government, out of the...

End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America unexpectedly faded away. Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height. Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences...

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

The book criticizes an attitude I call “global legalism,” the faith or hope that international law can solve the word’s problems even though the world is a largely anarchical place,...

This book makes a strong argument against the widespread perception, inside and outside the legal profession, that law is somehow an inanimate set of abstract rules which are the product...

Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate...

Traitors in wartime have a long history. During World War Two, both Allied and Axis governments used enemy nationals to broadcast propaganda. When the war ended, the victors prosecuted a...

My interest in the concept of obscenity grew out of a law school course on the topic of the rhetoric, law and culture. One of the readings was Sophocles’ play...

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

When Richard Newman died in Los Angeles in 1997, his body was taken to the county coroner’s office for a routine autopsy. Two years later, Newman’s father learned that the...

Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...

This book originated in the search for the origins of contemporary skepticism on the universality of human rights—a skepticism exemplified by the 1990s controversy on “Asian Values,” and more recent...

Birthright sets out to recount, for the first time, the real-life saga of James Annesley, which not only captivated eighteenth-century Britain but inspired five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s...

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores combines people, history, and law. The book is composed of six stories about early Americans and how brushes with the law affected everyday life. If the...

The book attempts to keep its feet firmly planted in two different worlds. On the one hand, it is a work of history. Moreover, it is a work of history...

Constitutional Cliffhangers is about six situations in which the Constitution’s provisions for selecting, replacing, and punishing presidents are seriously vulnerable. Each chapter starts out with a fictional scenario that dramatizes one...

At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...

Animals as Persons can be understood as a reaction to and rejection of the paradigm of animal welfare that has dominated our thinking about the moral status of nonhuman animals...

Religion and the belief in God have made a major comeback. From the fundamentalist turn in predominantly Islamic polities to the spread of Catholicism and Pentecostalism in the global south,...

The Justice Cascadeprovides an overview and an evaluation of one of the most important changes in global politics: the rise of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations. In it,...

My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In...

Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression. But is that right? In The Will...

The United States Constitution laid the groundwork for the intellectual property regime—giving Congress the power: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to...

Professional path I began the study of Arabic during my senior year at Yale. After receiving my B.A., I spent two years (1973-75) at the Hebrew University in the Department...

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is about the messy, uncertain process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, and the quasi-judicial ritual that South Africa used to help accomplish such...

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...

At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a...

The Birthright Lottery proposes a new way of thinking about the intergenerational transfer of citizenship as a special kind of property inheritance. It emphasizes the significance of citizenship – perhaps...