Allow Me to Retort
eBook - ePub

Allow Me to Retort

A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Allow Me to Retort

A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

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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Yes, you can access Allow Me to Retort by Elie Mystal in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Law Theory & Practice. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Preface: Originalism Aborts Progress
  6. Introduction
  7. 1: Canceling Trash People Is Not a Constitutional Crisis
  8. 2: Bigotry Is Illegal Even If You’ve Been Ordered to by Jesus
  9. 3: Everything You Know About the Second Amendment Is Wrong
  10. 4: Stop Frisking Me
  11. 5: Attack Dogs Are Not Reasonable
  12. 6: Why You Can’t Punch a Cop
  13. 7: Stopping Police Brutality
  14. 8: It Says What It Says
  15. 9: The Taking of Black Land
  16. 10: A Jury of Your White Peers
  17. 11: It’s Not Unusual to Be Cruel
  18. 12: The Most Important Part
  19. 13: Conservative Kryptonite
  20. 14: Reverse Racism Is Not a Thing
  21. 15: The Rule That May or May Not Exist
  22. 16: The Abortion Chapter
  23. 17: You Know This Thing Can Be Amended, Right?
  24. 18: The Right to Vote Shall Be Abridged All the Damn Time
  25. 19: What If Your Vote Actually Didn’t Matter?
  26. 20: Abolish the Electoral College
  27. 21: The Final Battle
  28. Epilogue
  29. Notes
  30. About the Author
  31. Read an excerpt from Bad Law
  32. Publishing in the Public Interest
  33. Copyright