Andrew Kahrl's timely book, The Black Tax, examines the racial disparities present in local governmental property tax systems. By examining the property tax regime, he enters the conversation about the role of tax policy in exacerbating the racial wealth gap. The Black Tax expands the conversation about analyzing tax policies through a racialized lens.

Through oral histories read in tandem with previously untapped archival sources, Margot Canaday's Queer Career unearths an entirely new body of evidence that captures the workplace experiences of a generation of gay and lesbian Americans whose stories have never been told. Canaday does so while making crucial interventions in sociolegal history, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of capitalism, intertwining those often-siloed genres in innovative and generative ways. My aim here is to highlight just a few of Queer Career's many contributions to the legal history of sex, gender, and sexuality and to the history of social movements and antidiscrimination law.

Histories of school prayer have typically concluded in the late 1980s, when court rulings and stalled legislation conclusively barred the door on the return of state-sponsored prayer to public schools. Through an analysis of See You at the Pole, a nationwide initiative formed in 1990 that mobilized millions of American students to gather annually to pray at their school flagpoles, this article argues that the 1990s witnessed not the waning of religion in public schools, but rather its revival in “student-initiated” forms. By tracing the pivot from debates over state sponsorship of religion to debates over students’ rights of free expression, this article establishes the 1990s as a major turning point in legal, political, and religious histories of school prayer. Further, this study of See You at the Pole illuminates how bipartisan, pluralist legitimating logics that crystallized in the 1990s underlie the phenomenon that scholars have recently termed “Christian nationalism.”

Firearms and ballistics are at the center of public debate in the United States today. They are technologies that are associated both with danger (in the form of gun violence) and safety (in the form of claims that firearms offer personal protection). This essay explores our understanding of the role of gun rights in American society through history: an issue which recent Supreme Court rulings have moved to the forefront of political debates in the face of efforts to regulate firearms and stem the tide of gun violence in the United States.

In the second half of the twentieth century, three Jewish men were stripped of their American citizenship after spending significant time in Palestine/Israel and engaging in statutorily defined “expatriating acts.” Integral to the doctrine of liberal citizenship, in fact, were illiberal mechanisms of individual and categorical exclusion from citizenship intended to protect the sovereignty of the nation-state. These mechanisms gained particular expression in state agents’ deliberations about the citizenship status of Jews, especially after the establishment of Israel. The emergence of dual citizenship as a legal possibility—the result of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the expatriation of one of the men considered here—reveals the shifting ambitions of American state power, while also exposing the enduring ways in which U.S. government entities, from Congress to administrative agencies to the courts, justified the state's power to transform citizens into aliens.

In 1917 Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act to prevent trade with Germany and the Central Powers. It was a wartime law designed for wartime conditions but one that, over the course of the following century, took on a secret, surprising life of its own. Eventually it became the basis for a project of worldwide economic sanctions applied by the United States at the discretion of the president during times of both war and peace. This article traces the history of the law in order to explore how the expansion of American power in the twentieth century required a transformation of the American state and the extensive use of executive powers justified by repeated declarations of national emergency.