How the Supreme Court's decision to treat unreasonable policing as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment has shortened the distance between life and death for Black people The summer of 2020 will be remembered as an unprecedented, watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality. Published on the second anniversary of the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Unreasonable is a groundbreaking investigation of the role that the law-and the U.S. Constitution-play in the epidemic of police violence against Black people. In this crucially timely book, celebrated legal scholar Devon W. Carbado explains how the Fourth Amendment became ground zero for regulating police conduct-more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection and due process. Fourth Amendment law determines when and how the police can make arrests, and it determines the precarious line between stopping Black people and killing Black people. A leading light in the critical race studies movement, Carbado looks at how that text, in the last four decades, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect police officers, not African Americans; how it sanctions search and seizure as well as profiling; and how it has become, ultimately, an amendment of life and death. Accessible, radical, and essential reading, Unreasonable sheds light on a rarely understood dimension of today's most pressing issue.

By re-writing US Supreme Court opinions that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, Critical Race Judgments demonstrates that it's possible to be judge and a critical race theorist. Specific issues covered in these cases include the death penalty, employment, voting, policing, education, the environment, justice, housing, immigration, sexual orientation, segregation, and mass incarceration. While some rewritten cases - Plessy v. Ferguson (which constitutionalized Jim Crow) and Korematsu v. United States (which constitutionalized internment) - originally focused on race, many of the rewritten opinions - Lawrence v. Texas (which constitutionalized sodomy laws) and Roe v. Wade (which constitutionalized a woman's right to choose) - are used to incorporate racial justice principles in novel and important ways. This work is essential for everyone who needs to understand why critical race theory must be deployed in constitutional law to uphold and advance racial justice principles that are foundational to US democracy.

By re-writing US Supreme Court opinions that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, Critical Race Judgments demonstrates that it's possible to be judge and a critical race theorist. Specific issues covered in these cases include the death penalty, employment, voting, policing, education, the environment, justice, housing, immigration, sexual orientation, segregation, and mass incarceration. While some rewritten cases - Plessy v. Ferguson (which constitutionalized Jim Crow) and Korematsu v. United States (which constitutionalized internment) - originally focused on race, many of the rewritten opinions - Lawrence v. Texas (which constitutionalized sodomy laws) and Roe v. Wade (which constitutionalized a woman's right to choose) - are used to incorporate racial justice principles in novel and important ways. This work is essential for everyone who needs to understand why critical race theory must be deployed in constitutional law to uphold and advance racial justice principles that are foundational to US democracy.

In Acting White, Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that racial judgments are often based not just on skin color, but on how a person conforms to behavior stereotypically associated with a certain race. Specifically, people judge racial minorities on how they "perform" their race. That includes the clothes they wear, how they style their hair, the institutions with which they affiliate, their racial politics, the people they befriend, date or marry, where they live, how they speak, and their outward mannerisms and demeanor. Employing these cues, decision-makers decide not simply whether a person is black but the degree to which she or he is so. Relying on numerous examples from the workplace, higher education, and police interactions, the authors demonstrate that, for African Americans, the costs of "acting black" are high. This creates pressures for blacks to "act white." But, as the authors point out, "acting white" has costs as well. Written in an easy style that is non-doctrinaire and provocative, the book makes complex concepts both accessible and interesting. Whether you agree and disagree with Acting White, the book will challenge your assumptions and make you think about racial prejudice from a fresh vantage point.