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The Nine

The Nine is Jeffrey Toobin’s reveals the lives of post-WWII Supreme Court Justices. He explores the notion of ideology and politics within the role of the judicial branch. We’ve chosen this 2007 title as a general look at the Supreme Court in order to discuss rule of law, personal politics, and the judicial branch more broadly.

The New Jim Crow

The US has used the War on drugs to create a racial caste system: a successor to the Jim Crow days we thought we left behind. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is one of the most important American books in the last decade. Alexander systematically explores the policy changes from the days of Nixon through the present – exploring how each decision has created and allowed a system which criminalizes blackness, brownness, otherness in way that both creates new racial biases and confirms them by incarcerating millions of young black and brown men (and to a lesser extent, black and brown women).

Bedrosian Center