The Supreme Court

A People's History of the Supreme Court

The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution

By: Peter Irons
Narrated by: David Drummond
Length: 28 hours 31 minutes

A comprehensive history of the people and cases that have changed history, this is the definitive account of the nation's highest court



Recent changes in the Supreme Court have placed the venerable institution at the forefront of current affairs, making this comprehensive and engaging work as timely as ever. In the tradition of Howard Zinn's... Read more

The Schoolhouse Gate

Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind

By: Justin Driver
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 19 hours 47 minutes

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public... Read more

Scorpions

The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

By: Noah Feldman
Narrated by: Cotter Smith
Length: 14 hours 37 minutes

A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented,... Read more

My Beloved World

By: Sonia Sotomayor
Narrated by: Rita Moreno
Length: 12 hours 26 minutes

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary... Read more

Out of Order

Stories from the History of the Supreme Court

By: Sandra Day O'Connor
Narrated by: Sandra Day O'Connor
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

“I called this book Out of Order because it reflects my goal, which is to share a different side of the Supreme Court. Most people know the Court only as it exists between bangs of the gavel, when the Court comes to order to hear arguments or give opinions. But the stories of the Court and the Justices that come from the ‘out of order’ moments... Read more

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide

The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965

By: Jia Lynn Yang
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 11 hours 56 minutes

The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia.



In a... Read more

Dissent and the Supreme Court

Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue

By: Melvin I. Urofsky
Narrated by: Dan Woren
Length: 19 hours 22 minutes

From the admired judicial authority, author of Louis D. Brandeis (“Remarkable”—Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books; “Monumental”—Alan M. Dershowitz, The New York Times Book Review), Division and Discord, and Supreme Decisions—Melvin Urofsky’s major new book looks at the role of dissent in the Supreme Court and the meaning of the... Read more

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.




Roxanne... Read more

Justice Deferred

Race and the Supreme Court

By: Orville Vernon Burton & Armand Derfner
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Length: 19 hours 4 minutes

The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the... Read more

As Long as Grass Grows

The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

By: Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism

Through the unique lens of “Indigenized environmental justice,” Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty... Read more

The Engagement

America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage

By: Sasha Issenberg
Narrated by: Graham Halstead
Length: 33 hours 46 minutes

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States—the most significant civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium

"Full of intimate details, battling personalities, heated court cases, public persuasion.”  —John Williams, The New York Times

On June 26, 2015, the U.S.... Read more

The Next Great Migration

The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move

By: Sonia Shah
Narrated by: Sonia Shah
Length: 10 hours 14 minutes

This program is read by the author

A prize-winning journalist upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration through science, history, and reporting--predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change.

The news today is full of stories of dislocated people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated... Read more

Supreme Inequality

The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America

By: Adam Cohen
Narrated by: Dan Woren
Length: 14 hours 15 minutes

“With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate

A revelatory... Read more

America for Americans

A History of Xenophobia in the United States

By: Erika Lee
Length: 13 hours 36 minutes

This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist)

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an... Read more

Scalia Speaks

Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived

By: Antonin Scalia
Narrated by: Christopher J. Scalia
Length: 13 hours 59 minutes

This definitive collection of beloved Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's finest speeches covers topics as varied as the law, faith, virtue, pastimes, and his heroes and friends. Featuring a foreword written and narrated by longtime friend Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and an intimate introduction by his youngest son, this volume includes... Read more

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #4

By: Paul Ortiz
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar... Read more

Making Our Democracy Work

A Judge's View

By: Justice Stephen Breyer
Narrated by: Luis Moreno
Length: 10 hours 16 minutes

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer delivers an impassioned argument for the proper role of America's highest judicial body. Examining historic and contemporary decisions by the Court, Breyer highlights the rulings that have bolstered public confidence as well as the missteps that have triggered distrust. What emerges is a unique... Read more

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia

By: United States Supreme Court
Narrated by: Anthony N. Damian
Length: 16 minutes

In 1831, the Cherokee Nation brought a case against the state of Georgia to the Supreme Court. They argued that as a separate foreign nation, certain Georgia laws overstepped their jurisdiction and wrongfully stripped Cherokees of their rights. The Justice Marshall ruled against this claim, stating that the Cherokee Nation was actually a... Read more

Hood Feminism

Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot

By: Mikki Kendall
Narrated by: Mikki Kendall
Length: 6 hours 57 minutes

“Hood Feminism touches on many subjects that mainstream feminists may not think of as feminist issues. Issues like food and housing insecurity, parenting, and disability rights, among others. Mikki Kendall calls out mainstream feminism as existing only for the advancement of white women, to the detriment of women of color. Some of my biggest... Read more

Devil in the Grove

Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

By: Gilbert King
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 17 hours 53 minutes

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” — Thomas Friedman, New York TimesArguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to... Read more