Books like Streetfighter in the Courtroom — picked by fans

This is the book that forced me to rethink how deeply race and criminal punishment are intertwined in America.

I had already spent years representing innocent people when I first read it, but Michelle Alexander still managed to make me uncomfortable in the best possible way. I remember constantly putting the book down just to process what I had read. What I admire most is that it doesn’t rely on outrage alone. It connects history, politics, policing, and incarceration in a way that made me see patterns I had previously viewed as isolated failures.

Few books have changed national conversations the way this one has, and I think it remains essential reading for anyone trying to understand modern America.

I love this book because Bryan Stevenson combines moral clarity with genuine compassion, even for people who have done terrible things.

As someone who has spent decades working on wrongful convictions, I recognized so much of the emotional reality in these pages, the exhaustion, the small victories, the moments that restore your faith in humanity, and the crushing setbacks. What stayed with me most was Stevenson’s refusal to reduce anyone to the worst thing they had ever done. I think that perspective is desperately needed in modern discussions about crime and punishment.

This is one of the rare books that can genuinely change the way a reader sees both the legal system and the people trapped inside it.

I recommend Ginger’s book because it inspired so many college students to go into law as well as young lawyers interested in effecting societal change. In one chapter, Ginger interviews Fay Stender, a source I consulted in writing Stender’s biography. Ginger also interviewed Fay’s law partner Charles Garry about his representation with Stender of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton in the case I consider the trial of the century. Fay’s husband Marvin Stender was also interviewed about his progressive law practice. Ginger’s book, and my interviews of Ann Ginger herself, proved essential to my understanding of the circle of Movement lawyers in the Bay Area to which they all heavily contributed during an extraordinary period of activism from the ‘50s through the ‘70s.     

I contacted Gilbert Moore in 2014 to share how valuable his book Rage was to my perspective as an author writing about the ground-breaking defense in the 1968 “trial of the century”, People v. Newton. Moore covered that headliner for LIFE magazine as its first black reporter. He agreed to be interviewed for our documentary project American Justice on Trial. Tragically, he died before the interview occurred. Watching that extraordinary trial caused Moore to engage in soul-searching, quit his plum job, and write his critically acclaimed book about the epiphany he experienced. Rage is considered a classic in African-American literature – an unparalleled window into the impact of that unprecedented Movement trial on pioneering black professionals in a white supremacist environment – through the eyes and pen of a firsthand observer.   

Don’t you love that title?!? And the novel is based on a true story about a ghost who testified at her own trial. Seriously. Testimony from the Greenbrier Ghost was accepted in a court of law. I’m just sorry I didn’t get around to writing about this one before Sharyn did!

This is one of my favorite books—probably because I was a stressed-out corporate lawyer who definitely can’t iron.

The Undomestic Goddess is the story of a workaholic lawyer who is trying to become a partner at her law firm—only to get fired for an egregious mistake that she can’t believe she made. In her shock, she agrees to become a housekeeper. The only problem is she has no idea how to do any housework, which leads to some hilarious scenes.

I also loved how she figured out the mystery leading to her dismissal. This book made me feel less alone as a stressed-out workaholic lawyer and also made me consider that maybe being a partner at a law firm was not what I really wanted in life.

Divorce lawyer Neil Hamel always seems to do more PI work than law. In Parrot Blues (A Neil Hamel Mystery) by Judith Van Gieson, she tries to locate a missing woman—and an indigo parrot. Oddly, the husband seems more concerned about the bird than his wife, who may be on her way out of the marriage anyway. But with the parrot as the only witness, it’s a tough case to crack. There’s plenty of New Mexico history and vistas to satisfy, but I found the information about birds and smuggling to be eye-opening. Her relationship with the “Kid” adds to Neil’s character. She’s her own woman, doing things her way. That alone gained my respect.

A chilling horror in a small fictional English village.

I love The Woman in Black because it’s more than a ghost story; it’s also a story about love and the connection between family. I’ve read it twice and what I love the most about it is the ambience Susan Hill creates with her well-crafted sentence structure.

There’s a lot of focus on Arthur Kipps, the protagonist, and his life before and after the haunting of Eel Marsh, but it’s not only him the story cares about. The Woman in Black herself is a mystery and has a tragic backstory that turns her from a full-on villain to a sympathetic one.

Although he is virtually unknown today, New York chancellor James Kent ranks as one of America's greatest state judges. Kent was an old-time Federalist, a believer in government by gentlemen. During his lifetime his views steadily lost ground to Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, but he made a permanent imprint on American law. Among other things, he authored the first general treatise on American law and arranged for national circulation of New York judicial decisions, thus giving his state an outsize role in shaping American law, and he helped preserve the central place of federal authority and protection of private property in the law. Kent deserves a modern biography, but until one is written, readers interested in New York history and legal history will find John Horton's older 1939 biography a lively and easy-to-read book, well worth their time.

Before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, there was Thurgood Marshall. As a young lawyer and head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Marshall spearheaded the civil rights organization’s slow but steady legal course in challenging and defeating segregation in the courts. Risking his life to represent black plaintiffs in the South and slowly building the legal precedents that led to Brown vs. Board of Education, Marshall had a profound effect on the course of history. This excellent biography takes you there.