Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Law and Order

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to law, courts and crime

Posted on June 27, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on law, courts and crime. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Making the Supreme Court: the politics of appointments, 1930–2020
by Charles M. Cameron and Jonathan P. Kastellec Oxford, 2023

In this book, Cameron and Kastellec (both, Princeton Univ.) integrate a wide variety of empirical analytical techniques with theoretical explanations for how and why individuals are chosen for the Supreme Court. The result is an outstanding example of political explanation. Their effort begins with an examination of how choices for the Court have moved from political friendships to legal professionals. This is followed by an analysis of the influence of the media and public opinion. The central portion of the book describes the use of lower court judges as “farm teams” for presidential Court selections and utilizes careful data analysis to plot the move to strong legal skills and dominance of partisan considerations in the selection process. The final section revisits the opening framework as a predictive tool, concluding that the results are mixed. Here, the authors examine term limits for Court judges and urge the need to temper the forces of partisanship in the selection process. Throughout, the book’s discussion of the evolution of procedural dynamics is supported by relevant graphs, tables, and surveys. View on Amazon

2. A Supreme Court unlike any other: the deepening divide between the justices and the people
McMahon, Kevin J. Chicago, 2024

McMahon (Trinity College) offers a compelling argument that the membership of the Supreme Court has become increasingly distant from American citizenry in the last several decades. The book posits three primary reasons, all based around the politics and procedures of the judicial nomination process, that explain the increasing divide between the Supreme Court and the citizens that it, in theory, serves. This divide is described as the “democracy gap,” which negatively impacts the court’s legitimacy. The book is organized into four parts, three of which discuss the reasons why the “democracy gap” has increased; the fourth section offers various conclusions. Simply, the reasons are that Republican presidents who have failed to earn the approval of the majority of the electorate are, with increasing frequency, the ones to nominate justices; the decreasingly representative nature of the appointees along the lines of class, geography, religion, and educational backgrounds; and the impact of the politics of the Supreme Court on presidential and senatorial campaigns.  View on Amazon

3. Viral Justice: how we grow the world we want
Benjamin, Ruha. Princeton, 2023

In Viral Justice, sociologist Ruha Benjamin (African American studies, Princeton Univ.) writes a culture using her own lived experiences situated in a world of injustice. Employing the tenets of autoethnography to organize this review, I hope to render the vigor, passion, historicity, and call to action that Benjamin presents to her readers. She begins and ends with the symbolism embedded in a homeplace reminiscent of bell hooks’s Yearning (1990), where “all that truly mattered in life took place—the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls.”[4]

Benjamin leads with the Great Migration of Black families following Reconstruction, using her own family’s journey from Georgia to Los Angeles in the 1950s as a springboard. She ruminates on childhood experiences and life lessons growing up in the “White House,” her paternal grandparents’ home (p. 1).[5] She learned how to navigate the neighborhood from her parents, grandmother, and surroundings, including the sounds of drive-by shootings, helicopters flying above, and sirens wailing through the night. The emotions wrought by these memories resurfaced with the 2020 shooting of Breonna Taylor, who was violently killed by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers when they entered her apartment under a no-knock warrant searching for suspected drugs. View on Amazon

4. The marvelous ones: drugs, gang violence, and resistance in East Los Angeles
Contreras, Randol. California, 2024

East Los Angeles is an independent enclave of extreme violence, criminal conduct, and stifling poverty. It is also home to a vibrant Mexican American community of residents chasing the American dream, but often hobbled by addiction and difficult circumstances. The community is home to members of embattled gangs called the Maravillas, “the marvelous ones.” Ethnographer Contreras (Univ. of California, Riverside) commendably succeeds in detailing this narrative through multiyear interviews and personal contact with 38 older men who are gang members. The challenges of ethnographic research are substantial for such researchers, including possible harm. Correspondingly, the realities for the Maravillas are daunting: drug addiction supported by criminal activity and turf battle with their enemies, the Mexican Mafia, while transitioning in and out of prison. Is there any hope here? Not for some who are unable to break the hold heroin has on their lives. Yet for others, marriage, family responsibilities, economic advancement, and the Pentecostal church shatter the life-darkening cycle. Contreras reports discerningly on his subjects’ views on many topics, including how members value the church, strive for connections with their families and peers, and expound political views on Trump. View on Amazon.

5. Supreme bias: gender and race in U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings
by Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand Stanford, 2023

Supreme Bias describes how race, gender, and partisanship interact to produce a two-tiered confirmation process for individuals nominated to the Supreme Court. Drawing on theoretical literature on in-groups and out-groups, the authors mine an “original data set” gleaned from Judiciary Committee hearings that took place between 1939 and 2022. The results are stark. In contrast to other nominees, women and people of color are interrupted more often, engage with senators whose comments are less positive and tinged with doubt, and face a significant number of questions in areas of supposed expertise, such as abortion, gender discrimination, civil rights, and crime. Female nominees also face a disproportionate number of comments that question their competence to serve on the Court. The silver lining to the cloud that the authors investigate comes in their discussion of the increased sensitivity of questioning by senators who participated in the 2018 Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh special session compared to those who participated in the Thomas-Hill hearings in 1991. Their work also suggests that recent trends to diversify the membership of the Judiciary Committee might undermine the biases that infected past hearings. View on Amazon.

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