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About this book
Finalist, ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books
The New York Times bestseller that has cemented Elie Mystal’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most acerbic legal minds
“After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . .” —Michael Harriot, The Root
Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.
Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media.
You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface: Originalism Aborts Progress
- Introduction
- 1: Canceling Trash People Is Not a Constitutional Crisis
- 2: Bigotry Is Illegal Even If You’ve Been Ordered to by Jesus
- 3: Everything You Know About the Second Amendment Is Wrong
- 4: Stop Frisking Me
- 5: Attack Dogs Are Not Reasonable
- 6: Why You Can’t Punch a Cop
- 7: Stopping Police Brutality
- 8: It Says What It Says
- 9: The Taking of Black Land
- 10: A Jury of Your White Peers
- 11: It’s Not Unusual to Be Cruel
- 12: The Most Important Part
- 13: Conservative Kryptonite
- 14: Reverse Racism Is Not a Thing
- 15: The Rule That May or May Not Exist
- 16: The Abortion Chapter
- 17: You Know This Thing Can Be Amended, Right?
- 18: The Right to Vote Shall Be Abridged All the Damn Time
- 19: What If Your Vote Actually Didn’t Matter?
- 20: Abolish the Electoral College
- 21: The Final Battle
- Epilogue
- Notes
- About the Author
- Read an excerpt from Bad Law
- Publishing in the Public Interest
- Copyright