Reading Group Selections
Each quarter during the academic year Legal Studies hosts a reading group for our faculty and graduate students interested in law. We provide the reading materials, you provide the dialog.
Keep an eye out for our future reading group events.
See below for our previous selections:
| Fall 2021 | America on Fire: The Untold Story of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s Elizabeth Hinton (Liveright 2021) |
| Spring 2021 | Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration Reuben Jonathan Miller (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) |
| Winter 2021 | Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership Brenna Bhandar (Duke University Press Books, 2018) |
| Fall 2020 | Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Justice, Power, and Politics) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) |
| Winter 2020 | The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality Katharina Pistor (Princeton University Press, 2019) |
| Fall 2019 | Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing Issa Kohler-Hausmann (Princeton University Press, 2019) |
| Spring 2019 | Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State Megan Ming Francis (Cambridge University Press, 2014) |
| Winter 2019 | Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America James Forman Jr. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) |
| Fall 2018 | Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor Virginia Eubanks (St. Martin's Press, 2018) |
| Spring 2018 | The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era Christopher W. Schmidt (University of Chicago Press, 2018) |
| Winter 2018 | Derrick Bell, “The Space Traders” from Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992) Patricia J. Williams, “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,” 22 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 401 (1987) [HeinOnline] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” 1989 U. Chi. Legal F. 139 (1989) [HeinOnline] |
| Fall 2017 | David M. Engel, "The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community," Law & Society Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 551-582 Hendrik Hartog, "Pigs and Positivism," Wisconsin Law Review 1985, no. 4 (1985): 899-935 |
| Spring 2017 | Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row Forrest Stuart (University Of Chicago Press, 2016) |
| Winter 2017 | 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement Keramet Reiter (Yale University Press, 2016) |
| Fall 2016 | Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic Professor Joanne B. Freeman (Yale University Press, 2002) |
| Spring 2016 | Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s Risa Goluboff (Oxford University Press, 2016) |
| Winter 2016 | Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Law in Context) Susan Haack (Cambridge University Press, 2014) |
| Fall 2015 | Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind Osagie K. Obasogie (Stanford Law Books, 2013) |
| Spring 2015 | Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Studies in Postwar American Political Development) Amanda Hollis-Brusky (Oxford University Press, 2015) |
| Winter 2015 | Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran Afsaneh Najmabadi (Duke University Press, 2013) |
| Fall 2014 | At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power Danielle L. McGuire (Knopf, 2010) |
| Spring 2014 | The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream Randol Contreras (University of California Press, 2013) |
| Winter 2014 | What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America Peggy Pascoe (Oxford University Press, 2010) |
| Fall 2013 | Everyday Law on the Street Mariana Valverde (University of Chicago Press, 2012) |
| Winter 2013 | The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California Joshua Page (Oxford University Press, 2012) |
| Fall 2012 | The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal Joanna Grisinger (Cambridge University Press, 2012) |
| Spring 2012 | Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press, 2012); and Mignon Moore, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women Joey Mogul (University of California Press, 2011). |
| Winter 2012 | Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History Dan Kanstroom (Harvard University Press, 2007) |
| Fall 2011 | Murder, Medicine and Motherhood Emma Cunliffe (Hart Publishing, 2011) |
| Winter 2010 | Movie night! Dislocation, a documentary by Sudhir Venkatesh (William B. Ransford Professor, Department of Sociology, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University) |