Look Back at a Blockbuster Fall for Faculty Books

Yale Law School had a bounty of faculty books in 2025, with four faculty members publishing new works just this fall. Authors tackled history, incarceration, philanthropy, and constitutional law. Here is a taste of the faculty books published this term.

In “The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education,” Justin Driver considers the consequences of what he calls “the most significant judicial opinion involving race and education since Brown v. Board of Education.”

The book centers on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. Conservatives celebrated the decision as a triumph of colorblindness while liberals despaired that it was the end of racial equity. Driver, Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, argues that both sides have gotten it wrong. He argues that the ruling does not mark the end of racial diversity in higher education but the beginning of a new chapter in the fight for equity. As he explained in an interview, Driver also wanted to convey the valuable contributions that affirmative has action made.

“I believe that we should think of affirmative action as belonging in the same class of transformational pieces of legislation, like the GI Bill, that made this nation better,” Driver said.

The book has garnered significant attention and acclaim. In a front-page story about the Trump administration’s efforts to secure university admissions data, The New York Times quoted Driver and mentioned his book. The Times also made the book an Editor’s Choice selection, calling it “compact and insightful.”

“Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution 1840–1920,” the latest book from Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Akhil Reed Amar ’84, recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that took place in the 80 years following the Civil War. The book follows 2021’s “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840,” as the second volume of a planned trilogy on U.S. on American constitutional history.

Amar shows how the Constitution evolved in the period that saw the passage of the four transformative amendments. The first three were passed soon after the war: the 13th, abolishing slavery; the 14th, establishing birthright citizenship; and the 15th extending voting rights to Black men. In 1920, Americans would expand the ideal of equality yet again with the 19th Amendment, which granted the right to vote to women.

“In these fateful years, as birth equality continued its if at times indirect march, Americans of all sorts … thought and argued about constitutional law in ways that ultimately transformed the nation and the world,” Amar writes.

To tell the story, Amar features four prominent figures who influenced how America understands equality: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. He uses as his starting point lines from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, particularly the phrase “all men are created equal.” It’s a phrase that many people can quote, but few fully understand, he explains in an interview.

“The Constitution is going to be amended four different times to codify this idea that we’re all created equal, which is going to morph into an idea that Americans are born equal citizens and, eventually, equal voters,” he said.

The idea of birthright citizenship is not only timely after being challenged by executive order in 2025 — it has personal significance for Amar. In a Wall Street Journal essay coinciding with the publication of the book, Amar writes about his own experience as the first person in his family to be born in the U.S. and gain birthright citizenship, “an extraordinary birthday present from the American people.”

Judith Resnik poses a question in her book: can prisons escape their ties to plantations and concentration camps? In “Impermissible Punishments: How Prisons Became a Problem for Democracy,” Resnik examines the history of punishment inside prisons and the rules that organize prisons. Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law and founding director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law, charts the invention of the corrections profession that called for decent conditions while imposing radical restrictions on human movement. She weaves together the stories of people who debated how to punish and the stories of people living under the resulting systems.

“Impermissible Punishments” excavates the first-ever international rules aiming to improve the treatment of prisoners, which the League of Nations adopted in 1934 as the Nazis rose to power. Her trans-Atlantic account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, and of pioneering prisoners who insisted that the law protected their dignity as individuals. Resnik maps the results, including a trial in the United States about the constitutionality of whipping, used in the 1960s by prisons in Arkansas. 

The book begins with the handwritten 1965 petition of Winston Talley, who wrote to a federal court in Arkansas about his beating in prison with a whip. Citing the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” Talley asked the court to order that floggings in prison be stopped “And the Whipp destroyed.”

Resnik recounts the trial of Talley v. Stephens, which received front-page coverage in Arkansas newspapers. The case did not result in the state banning whipping but instead led to the “Talley Rules,” which codified how whipping could be carried out. Those verdicts are yet another example of the many venues in which lines are drawn between permissible and impermissible punishments, and Resnik argues they provide chilling reminders of public toleration for leaving prisoners in harm’s way.

Ultimately, Resnik concludes that governments committed to equality cannot set out to ruin people and therefore many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.

When an idealistic young heir to a Wall Street banking fortune named Charles Garland turned down a million-dollar inheritance in 1920, the writer Upton Sinclair wrote him with a different idea: accept the money and start a foundation to give it away.

So begins the latest book by John Fabian Witt ’99, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law. “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America” tells the story of the American Fund for Public Service. Also known as the Garland Fund, its purpose was boilerplate philanthropic mission-statement: “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” But as Witt explains, Garland and the crew he assembled to administer the fund aimed for something much grander.

For the next two decades, the fund would champion the needs of working-class people, equality for Black Americans, and free speech — the latter before the courts had started to enforce that right. 

“They believed that American capitalism was broken,” Witt writes. “They believed that American democracy, if it had ever existed, disserved those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age.”

The fund’s list of beneficiaries reads like the greatest hits of early 20th century progressive causes: the NAACP as it laid the groundwork for landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education as well as defenses in the Scopes trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Scottsboro Boys. The fund also hoped to sway public opinion and influence popular culture through movies, a radio station, and a publishing house.

The fund was decidedly unradical when it came to corporate governance, however. The board issued annual reports, hired accountants, and sought and found tax advantages —loopholes, according to critics. Even the fund’s most active member expressed unease about money’s role in politics, foreshadowing current concerns.

“The Fund’s story illuminates an amalgam of radicalism and practicality at the foundations of some of the signal achievements of the 20th century,” Witt writes.