Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they did not have a case against him.
Ford’s trial was a travesty. One of his court-appointed lawyers specialized in oil and gas law and had never tried a case. The other had been out o ... Show More
Nov 19
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even tod ... Show More
54m 29s
Oct 2024
#015 - Jarrett Adams - The Prison Industrial Complex
Jarrett Adams is a defense attorney, author, and founder of Life After Justice, a nonprofit focused on fighting wrongful convictions and supporting reintegration for exonerated individuals. In this episode, we get into his story of being wrongfully convicted at 17, the realities ... Show More
1h 35m
Dec 2024
Sandhya Fuchs, "Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India (Stanford University Press, 2024). Against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement, debates around the social impact of hate crime legislation have come to the political fore. In 2019, the UN Commission on Crim ... Show More
1h 44m
Jul 2023
Mayur R. Suresh, "Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts" (Fordham UP, 2022)
In Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham UP, 2022), Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the secu ... Show More
47m 8s
Jan 2024
Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)
Rita Kesselring’s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effects of state-sponsored violence as well the limits of the law to produce social repai ... Show More
45m 41s
Nov 2023
Alex Murdaugh's Road To A Retrial Gets Clearer By The Day
In a shocking turn of events, Alex Murdaugh, the once-revered attorney, has admitted guilt to a series of financial crimes, a move that has rippled through the legal community and the public alike. With the looming shadow of his murder trial still hanging overhead, Murdaugh's con ... Show More
5m 19s
May 2022
Sean J. Drake, "Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb" (U California Press, 2022)
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect mode ... Show More
55m 27s
Oct 9
A verdict in Texas. Inside Sean Combs’ sentencing. Plus, a look at a looming execution.
<p>In Texas, a verdict in the trial of the woman prosecutors say poisoned her fifth husband. In Manhattan, Sean Combs is sentenced to more than four years in prison by a federal judge. Updates in the Karina Cooper, Ghislane Maxwell, and Brian Walshe cases. Plus, Lester Holt joins ... Show More
27m 16s
Feb 2019
David Ray Papke, "Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor" (Michigan State UP, 2019)
The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than go ... Show More
31m 17s