Silver Gavel Award, Honorable MentionScribes Merit AwardIn June 2001, there was a decidedly new look to the graduating class at Virginia Military Institute. For the first time ever, the line of graduates who received their degrees at the “West Point of the South” included women who had spent four years at VMI.For 150 years, VMI had operated as a revered, state-funded institution—an amalgam of Southern history, military tradition, an...

Silver Gavel Award, Honorable MentionIn the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor—or was directly related to a survivor—of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum’s dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (a...

While Brown v. Board of Education remains much more famous, Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947) was actually the first case in which segregation in education was successfully challenged in federal court. Finally giving Mendez its due, Philippa Strum provides a concise and compelling account of its legal issues and legacy, while retaining its essential human face: that of Mexican Americans unwilling to accept second-class citizenship. 1945 Gonzalo and Felicitas Me...

Before she became the “Notorious R.B.G.” famous for her passionate dissents while serving as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made her most significant contributions as a lawyer who litigated cases on gender equality before the high court in the 1970s. Beginning with Reed v. Reed (1971)—for which Ginsburg wrote her first full Supreme Court brief, and which was the first time the Court held a sex-based classification to be unconstitutiona...

Anita Whitney was a child of wealth and privilege who became a vocal leftist early in the twentieth century, supporting radical labor groups such as the Wobblies and helping to organize the Communist Labor Party. In 1919 she was arrested and charged with violating California's recently passed laws banning any speech or activity intended to change the American political and economic systems. The story of the Supreme Court case that grew out of Whitney’s conviction, told in full in this book...

Before she became the "Notorious R.B.G." famous for her passionate dissents while serving as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made her most significant contributions as a lawyer who litigated cases on gender equality before the high court in the 1970s. Beginning with Reed v. Reed (1971)—for which Ginsburg wrote her first full Supreme Court brief, and which was the first time the Court held a sex-based classification to be unconstitutiona...

Philippa Strum, our foremost authority on Louis Brandeis, gathers together for the first time a sterling selection from his most provocative and profound writings. A kind of “Portable Brandeis,” this book provides a concise and readable guide to the thought of a truly great American.Brandeis, the Ralph Nader of the early twentieth century, was known as the “People’s Attorney” for his continuous crusades on behalf of the public. He spoke before citizens’ groups and legislative bodie...

Choice Outstanding TitleRevered as the “People’s Attorney,” Louis D. Brandeis concluded a distinguished career by serving as an associate justice (1916-1939) of the U.S. Supreme Court. Philippa Strum argues that Brandeis—long recognized as a brilliant legal thinker and defender of traditional civil liberties—was also an important political theorist whose thought has become particularly relevant to the present moment in American politics.Brandeis, Strum show...