100 books like Make No Law

Monumental, extraordinary, a landmark: only superlatives would do in 1975 to praise Simple Justice by Richard Kluger.

If you want to understand education in America, race in America, the absence of equity in America, Simple Justice gets you there. The book begins with the South Carolina heroes of Briggs v. Elliott, impoverished rural petitioners who filed the first of five lawsuits composing Brown v. Board of Education. The book ends with the 1954 and 1955 US Supreme Court’s decisions declaring unconstitutional the legal segregation of public schools.

Kluger focuses on people, beginning with tenant farmers and sharecroppers who defied the white men controlling their every breath and petitioned for “equal everything.” Kluger’s vivid storytelling was among my inspirations, forty years after Brown, to seek South Carolina’s forgotten heroes. 

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy” as it struck down Connecticut’s longstanding ban on the sale and use of birth control. (Amazing trivia: the state legislator who drafted the state’s 1879 anti-contraceptive law was P.T. Barnum.) Garrow’s history recounts the decades-long efforts of Connecticut activists to challenge the restriction, and how lawyers shifted their choice of plaintiffs from doctors asserting the law interfered with their ability to provide medical advice to married women claiming a right to privacy within their marriages. In the years following Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court gradually expanded that novel privacy doctrine, extending it to the intimate decisions of unmarried people, and eventually to cover the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade.

The issue before the court in 1983’s Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha concerned one of the grandest principles of the American project, the separation of powers, but the facts of the case were all at a tragically human scale. Jagdish Chadha had come to the United States as a student, but when the INS determined he had overstayed his visa it was not clear what to do with him. Born in colonial Kenya to Indian parents and then moved to the United States, explains Craig, “he was not deportable but he had no visa, no papers of any kind to show prospective employers.” After Congress stepped in to intervene with the INS’s handling of Chadha’s case, using a fairly obscure mechanism known as the “legislative veto,” litigators working with Ralph Nader volunteered to represent him; they saw an avenue to pull back lawmakers’ ability to meddle with administration policy… show more.

I admire this book for its measured erudition on a topic (guns) that the author feels is the most formative cultural chasm in the US. Winkler, a renowned legal scholar, uses the 2008 Supreme Court Heller decision that enshrined the second amendment as an individual right to bear arms as the touchstone for a riveting and more wide-ranging investigation of the history of gun rights as well as gun control laws. Winkler finds historical precedents for the concept of an individual right (if not a mandate, in some cases) to bear arms.

However, what I found most surprising is Winkler’s account of the equally sturdy and deeply-rooted history of gun control and regulation. This revises the popular wisdom that gun control, essentially, has no history—that the US was a land of unfettered gun-toting and gun-owning that was only later thwarted by modern, liberal gun restrictions. On the contrary, by the… show more.

Crusoe is a failed slaver, a reckless son, a bad sailor, a pretty crap boss, a parrot lover and, in all of that, he shows us how damaged and imperfect a system we have inherited.

I love Robinson Crusoe for its audacity. When it was first published in 1719, readers were furious to discover that there was no such person as Crusoe but that, instead, the story was fabricated by one Daniel Defoe, who had recently spent three days in the stockades for seditious libel. I love the insanity of this story, how it wants us to believe that a man spends 28 years on a deserted island and still comes home to England richer than when he left. A flawed novel but our first in English, it is also our first autofiction. 

This is a historical novel about the life of Theodora, Empress of Byzantium. She was born in the sixth century and worked as a prostitute, but eventually became the most powerful woman in the Byzantine Empire. The book is very introspective and we learn a lot about Theodora's inner world. Even though the world throws the worst at her, she still finds the strength to continue onward and keep a sense of justice and positivity.

Loretta Chase presents a thoroughly entertaining Beauty and the Beast story in Lord of Scoundrels, book three of her Scoundrels series. Miss Jessica Trent attempts to negotiate with the Marquess of Dain in order to extract her idiot brother from Dain’s unhealthy influence. But Dain dislikes the species known as “ladies” and trusts them even less. He offers Jessica his own self-serving terms, which she roundly rejects. They’re horribly attracted to one another, which Dain refuses to acknowledge, and Jessica knows is the road to ruin. Experiencing this big, powerful, beastly man’s taming at the hands of a small, beautiful, fiercely intelligent woman is delightful. Their dialogue and banter are stellar and their constant battles a thing of beauty. Truly, one of the best Regency’s out there.  

This book is a delight, from start to finish. I read it in one sitting. Like Lucrezia Borgia, it is both popular and erudite, but it does not recount the titular protagonist’s biography. Instead, it goes through all of the myths that have been floating around this unfortunate queen since her own lifetime. Bordo separates contemporary slander from fact, but then goes on to follow how the legend of Anne Boleyn was developed over the centuries in histories, fiction, and film. This study is also explicitly a study of how a legend takes hold and evolves.

CIA officer Frank Snepp was one of the last American officials to leave Vietnam in 1975. But when he published a damning critique of the U.S. war effort in a book (A Decent Interval), it ignited a controversy that was widely covered in the press and led all the way to the Supreme Court. Snepp was charged with causing 'irreparable harm' to national security and ordered to surrender all profits from the publication. His account of the events around the court case are of course subjective but nonetheless speaks to a central paradox around the first amendment: freedom of speech is essentially suspended for national security officials. The legacy of Snepp’s case continues to cast a long shadow, affecting individuals as varied as Edward Snowden and John Bolton in our day.

Hume’s Essays were a great publishing success at soon as they appeared. They established his reputation not only in the UK, but also on the Continent and America. Entertaining, they not only considered issues of the day such as commerce and the progress of civilization but treat of questions that remain relevant today on freedom of the press, political parties, taxes, and divorce. The writing is elegant and helps us understand the making of modernity.