In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles—outcasts of the new French citizenry—and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between colonial officials, planters, and others, ranging from deported political enemies to convicts, ex-convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, non-European immigrants, and Maroons (descendants of fugitive slaves in the forest). She finds that at a time when France was advocating the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Guiana’s exiles were stripped of their legal identities and unmade by law, becoming nonpersons living in limbo.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but as Spieler shows, it also invented the noncitizen—the person whose rights were nonexistent. Empire and Underworld discovers in Guiana’s wilderness a haunting prehistory of current moral dilemmas surrounding detainees of indeterminate legal status. Pairing the history of France with that of its underworld and challenging some of the century’s most influential theorists from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault, Spieler demonstrates how rights of the modern world can mutate into an apparatus of human deprivation.

It isn’t enough to celebrate the death penalty’s demise. We must learn from it.

When Henry McCollum was condemned to death in 1984 in rural North Carolina, death sentences were commonplace. In 2014, DNA tests set McCollum free. By then, death sentences were as rare as lethal lightning strikes. To most observers this national trend came as a surprise. What changed? Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform.

No single factor put the death penalty on the road to extinction, Garrett concludes. Death row exonerations fostered rising awareness of errors in death penalty cases, at the same time that a decline in murder rates eroded law-and-order arguments. Defense lawyers radically improved how they litigate death cases when given adequate resources. More troubling, many states replaced the death penalty with what amounts to a virtual death sentence—life without possibility of parole. Today, the death penalty hangs on in a few scattered counties where prosecutors cling to entrenched habits and patterns of racial bias.

The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong closing case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.

Uniquely in the United States, lawyers litigate large cases on behalf of many claimants who could not afford to sue individually. In these class actions, attorneys act typically as risk-taking entrepreneurs, effectively hiring the client rather than acting as the client’s agent. Lawyer-financed, lawyer-controlled, and lawyer-settled, such entrepreneurial litigation invites lawyers to sometimes act more in their own interest than in the interest of their clients. And because class litigation aggregates many claims, defendants object that its massive scale amounts to legalized extortion. Yet, without such devices as the class action and contingent fees, many meritorious claims would never be asserted.

John Coffee examines the dilemmas surrounding entrepreneurial litigation in a variety of specific contexts, including derivative actions, securities class actions, merger litigation, and mass tort litigation. His concise history traces how practices developed since the early days of the Republic, exploded at the end of the twentieth century, and then waned as Supreme Court decisions and legislation sharply curtailed the reach of entrepreneurial litigation. In an evenhanded account, Coffee assesses both the strengths and weaknesses of entrepreneurial litigation and proposes a number of reforms to achieve a fairer balance. His goal is to save the class action, not discard it, and to make private enforcement of law more democratically accountable. Taking a global perspective, he also considers the feasibility of exporting a modified form of entrepreneurial litigation to other countries that are today seeking a mechanism for aggregate representation.

The first Earth Day in 1970 marked environmentalism’s coming-of-age in the United States. More than four decades later, does the green movement remain a transformative force in American life? Presenting a new account from a legal perspective, Environment in the Balance interprets a wide range of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, along with social science research and the literature of the movement, to gauge the practical and cultural impact of environmentalism and its future prospects.

Jonathan Z. Cannon demonstrates that from the 1960s onward, the Court’s rulings on such legal issues as federalism, landowners’ rights, standing, and the scope of regulatory authority have reflected deep-seated cultural differences brought out by the mass movement to protect the environment. In the early years, environmentalists won some important victories, such as the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision allowing them to sue against barriers to recycling. But over time the Court has become more skeptical of their claims and more solicitous of values embodied in private property rights, technological mastery and economic growth, and limited government.

Today, facing the looming threat of global warming, environmentalists struggle to break through a cultural stalemate that threatens their goals. Cannon describes the current ferment in the movement, and chronicles efforts to broaden its cultural appeal while staying connected to its historical roots, and to ideas of nature that have been the source of its distinctive energy and purpose.

The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government, increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections. John Compton offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century.

Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform, antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of property on moral grounds.

In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary’s acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a progressive constitutional regime—rooted in evangelical Protestantism—that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century.

Should laws apply equally to everyone, or should some individuals and organizations be granted exemptions because of conflicting religious or moral convictions? In recent years, this question has become intensely controversial in America. The Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, in particular, has provoked barbed debates about legal exemptions. At the core of these debates lies the question of whether basic values of equality and nondiscrimination are at odds with the right to live according to one’s religious beliefs.

In Exemptions: Necessary, Justified, or Misguided? Kent Greenawalt draws on his extensive expertise to place same-sex marriage and other controversies within a broader context. Avoiding oversimplification and reflecting a balanced consideration of competing claims and harms, he offers a useful overview of various types of exemptions and the factors that we should take into account when determining the justice of a particular exemption.

Through a close study of several cases, from doctors who will not perform abortions to institutions that do not pay taxes, Greenawalt demonstrates how to weigh competing values without losing sight of practical considerations like the difficulty of implementing a specific law. This thoughtful guide to exemptions will prove an invaluable resource as America struggles to come to terms with Obergefell v. Hodges, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and similar controversies. Exemptions shows how to reach the most just and desirable legal conclusions by respecting those who wish to live according to different fundamental values.