Extreme weather is increasing in scale and severity as global warming worsens. While poorer communities are typically most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, even well-resourced communities are increasingly vulnerable as climate-related storms intensify. Yet little is known about how middle-class communities are responding to these storms and the resulting damage. In Soaking the Middle Class, sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris examine how a middle-class community recovers from a climate-related disaster and how this process fosters inequality within these kinds of places.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped record-breaking rainfall in Southeast Texas resulting in more than $125 billion in direct damages. Rhodes and Besbris followed 59 flooded households in Friendswood, Texas, for two years after the storm to better understand the recovery process in a well-resourced, majority-White, middle-class suburban community. As such, Friendswood should have been highly resilient to storms like Harvey, yet Rhodes and Besbris find that the recovery process exacerbated often-invisible economic inequality between neighbors. Two years after Harvey, some households were in better financial positions than they were before the storm, while others still had incomplete repairs, were burdened with large new debts, and possessed few resources to draw on should another disaster occur.

Rhodes and Besbris find that recovery policies were significant drivers of inequality, with flood insurance playing a key role in the divergent recovery outcomes within Friendswood. Households with flood insurance prior to Harvey tended to have higher incomes than those that did not. These households received high insurance payouts, enabling them to replace belongings, hire contractors, and purchase supplies. Households without coverage could apply for FEMA assistance, which offered considerably lower payouts, and for government loans, which would put them into debt. Households without coverage found themselves exhausting their financial resources, including retirement savings, to cover repairs, which put them in even more financially precarious positions than they were before the flood.

The vast majority of Friendswood residents chose to repair and return to their homes after Hurricane Harvey. Even this devastating flood did not alter their plans for long-term residential stability, and the structure of recovery policies only further oriented homeowners towards returning to their homes. Prior to Harvey, many Friendswood households relied on flood damage from previous storms to judge their vulnerability and considered themselves at low risk. After Harvey, many found it difficult to assess their level of risk for future flooding. Without strong guidance from federal agencies or the local government on how to best evaluate risk, many residents ended up returning to potentially unsafe places.

As climate-related disasters become more severe, Soaking the Middle Class illustrates how inequality in the United States will continue to grow if recovery policies are not fundamentally changed.

ANNA RHODES is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rice University

MAX BESBRIS is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Algorithms–rules written into software–shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Today, high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, but its code navigates moral questions: Which of a person’s traits are fair to consider as part of a job application? Who deserves priority in accessing scarce public resources, whether those are school seats, housing, or medicine? When someone first appears in a courtroom, how should their freedom be weighed against the risks they might pose to others?

Policymakers and the public often find algorithms to be complex, opaque and intimidating—and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. But that approach leaves technical experts holding the moral microphone, and it stops people who lack technical expertise from making their voices heard. Today, policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software — exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.

In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new transplant matching algorithm – a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list.

Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book’s final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.

DAVID G. ROBINSON is a visiting scholar at the Social Science Matrix at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty at Apple University. From 2018 to 2021, he developed this book as a Visiting Scientist at Cornell’s AI Policy and Practice Project. Earlier, Robinson co-founded and led Upturn, an NGO that partners with civil rights organizations to advance equity and justice in the design, governance, and use of digital technology.

“A riveting narrative of how decent people are transformed by conducive structural conditions into malevolent slumlords, Collateral Damages is guaranteed to make you think about the housing crisis in a new light. Meredith J. Greif lays bare how the very regulations meant to protect marginalized tenants stoke landlords’ illegal and immoral behaviors, ensuring even greater precarity in tenants’ lives. If you want to understand housing in America, this book is not to be missed.”
—KATHRYN EDIN, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs,Princeton University

“Collateral Damages provides a critical window into the understudied practices and motivations of small landlords, who collectively provide homes to most of the nation’s poor renters. Meredith J. Greif highlights the financial vulnerability of these housing providers and shows how structural forces can lead some of them to engage in harmful practices. Balanced and engaging, the book sends an important, cautionary note about how well-intentioned local laws can backfire and harm the very low-income renters they are meant to protect.”
—INGRID GOULD ELLEN, Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, New York University

Changes in federal housing policies over the past several decades shifted the primary responsibility for providing low-income renters with affordable housing from the government to private landlords. Federal, state, and local governments have passed laws to ensure that low-income renters are protected from illicit landlording practices. Yet we know little about how private landlords experience local housing regulations. In Collateral Damages, sociologist Meredith Greif examines how local laws affect private landlords and whether tenants are, in fact, being adequately protected.

For three years, Greif followed 60 private landlords serving low- and moderate-income residents in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area to better understand how local regulations, such as criminal activity nuisance ordinances (CANOs) and local water billing regulations, affect their landlording practices. CANOs are intended to protect communities by discouraging criminal activity on private properties. Property owners can face financial and criminal sanctions if they do not abate nuisance activities, which can include littering, noise, drug use, and calls for police assistance, including calls for domestic violence. Local water billing regulations hold landlords responsible for delinquent water bills, even in cases where the account is registered in the tenant’s name. Greif finds that such laws often increase landlords’ sense of “financial precarity” – the real or perceived uncertainty that their business is financially unsustainable – by holding them responsible for behavior they feel is out of their control. Feelings of financial uncertainty led some landlords to use illegitimate business practices against their tenants, including harassment, oversurveillance, poor property upkeep, and illegal evictions. And to avoid to financial penalities associated with CANOs and delinquent water bills, some landlords engage in discriminatory screening of vulnerable potential tenants who are unemployed or have histories of domestic violence or drug use. In this sense, by promoting a sense of financial insecurity among landlords, laws meant to protect renters ultimately had the opposite effect.

While some landlords, particularly those who rented a larger number of units, were able to operate their businesses both lawfully and profitably, the majority could not. Greif offers practical recommendations to address the concerns of small- and mid-sized landlords, such as regular meetings that bring landlords and local authorities together to engage in constructive dialogue about local housing policy, issues, and concerns. She also proposes policy recommendations to protect renters, such as establishing the right to counsel for lower-income tenants in eviction hearings and enacting a federal renter’s tax credit.

Collateral Damages is an enlightening investigation on how local laws and practices perpetuate disadvantage among marginalized populations and communities, in ways that are hidden and often unintended.

MEREDITH GREIF is assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University

We recently sat down with Ann Morning & Marcello Maneri to understand how everyday people view race in Italy and the United States. You can watch an abridged video of the interview above, or read or listen to the full transcript below.

Listen to Part 1 of 2 of the interview

Listen to Part 2 of 2 of the interview

Read a transcript of the full interview here.

Scholars and politicians often assume a significant gap between the ways that Americans and Europeans think about race. According to this template, in the U.S. race is associated with physical characteristics, while in Western Europe race has disappeared, and discrimination is based on insurmountable cultural differences. However, little research has addressed how average Americans and Europeans actually think and talk about race. In An Ugly Word, sociologists Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri examine American and Italian understandings of group difference in order to determine if and how they may differ.

Morning and Maneri interviewed over 150 people across the two countries about differences among what they refer to as “descent-based groups.” Using this concept allowed them to sidestep the language of “race” and “ethnicity,” which can be unnecessarily narrow, poorly defined, or even offensive to some. Drawing on these interviews, the authors find that while ways of speaking about group difference vary considerably across the Atlantic, underlying beliefs about it do not. The similarity in American and Italian understandings of difference was particularly evident when discussing sports. Both groups relied heavily on traditional stereotypes of Black physicality to explain Black athletes’ overrepresentation in sports like U.S. football and their underrepresentation in sports like swimming – contradicting the claims that a biological notion of race is a distinctly American phenomenon.

While American and Italian concepts of difference may overlap extensively, they are not identical. Interviews in Italy were more likely to reveal beliefs about groups’ innate, unchangeable temperaments, such as friendly Senegalese and dishonest Roma. And where physical difference was seen by Italians as superficial and unimportant, cultural difference was perceived as deeply meaningful and consequential. In contrast, U.S. interviewees saw cultural difference as supremely malleable—and often ascribed the same fluidity to racial identity, which they believed stemmed from culture as well as biology. In light of their findings, Morning and Maneri propose a new approach to understanding cross-cultural beliefs about descent-based difference that includes identifying the traits people believe differentiate groups, how they believe those traits are acquired, and whether they believe these traits can change.

An Ugly Word is an illuminating, cross-national examination of the ways in which people around the world make sense of race and difference.

ANN MORNING is professor of sociology at New York University

MARCELLO MANERI is associate professor of sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca

"Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America offers a compelling study examining the linkage between skin color and politics in the United States. Importantly, Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon embark on a careful comparative analysis that examines the nuances and varied effects of skin color on the political attitudes of the three major ethnoracial groups in the United States."
—MARISA ABRAJANO, professor of political science, University of California, San Diego

"The conception of race as a social construct is not novel. What is novel and what makes Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America an essential read is its nuanced and deeper understanding—from measurement to meaning—of the multifaceted ways that people are stratified by skin shade both across and within broadly defined racial groups, and how that sorting links to power and politics."
—DARRICK HAMILTON, university professor and Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, The New School

"Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America is a landmark achievement. It provides new and important insights about how skin tone shapes politics within and across ethnoracial categories. By looking beyond broad ethnoracial categories using novel data, Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon carefully reveal the manifold pathways through which race, gender, color, and class influence political ideologies and ethnoracial politics in the United States. In so doing, Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America is an indispensable resource and a must-read for anyone interested in enriching their understanding of contemporary ethnoracial politics in the United States."
—ELLIS MONK, associate professor of sociology, Harvard University

A person’s skin color affects their life experiences including income, educational attainment, health outcomes, exposure to discrimination, interactions with the criminal justice system and one’s sense of ethnoracial group belonging. But, do these disparate experiences affect the relationship between skin color and political views? In Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America, political scientists Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon explore the relationship between skin color and political views in the U.S. among Latino, Black, and White Americans. They examine how skin color influences an individual’s politics and whether a person’s political views influence how they assess their own skin color.

Ostfeld and Yadon surveyed over 1,300 people about their political views, including party affiliation, their opinions on welfare, and the importance of speaking English in the U.S. The authors created a matrix grounded in their “Roots of Race” framework, which predicts the relationship between skin color and political attitudes for each ethnoracial group based on the blurriness of the group’s boundaries and historical levels of privilege. They draw upon three distinct measures of skin color to conceptualize the relationship between skin color and political views: “Machine-Rated Skin Color,” measured with a light-reflectance meter; “Self-Assessed Skin Color,” using the Yadon-Ostfeld Skin Color Scale; and “Skin Color Discrepancy,” the difference between one’s Machine-Rated and Self-Assessed Skin Color.

Ostfeld and Yadon examine patterns that emerge among these measures, and their relationships with life experiences and political stances. Among Latinos, a group with relatively blurry group boundaries and low levels of historical privilege, the authors find a robust relationship between political views and Self-Assessed Skin Color. Latinos who overestimate the lightness of their skin color are more likely to hold conservative views on current racialized political issues, such as policing. Latinos who overestimate the darkness of their skin color, on the other hand, are more likely to hold liberal political views. As America’s major political parties remain divided on issues of race, this suggests that for Latinos, self-reported skin color is used as a means of aligning oneself with valued political coalitions.

African Americans, another group with low levels of historical privilege but with more clearly defined group boundaries, demonstrated no significant relationship between skin color and political attitudes. Thus, the lived experiences associated with being African American appeared to supersede the differences in life experiences due to skin color.

Whites, a group with more historical privilege and increasingly blurry group boundaries, showed a clear relationship between machine-assessed skin color and attitudes on political issues. Those with darker Machine-Rated Skin Color are more likely to hold conservative views, suggesting that they are responding to the threat of losing their privilege in a multicultural society.

At a time when the U.S. is both more diverse and politically divided, Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America is a timely account of the ways in which skin color and politics are intertwined.

MARA OSTFELD is an assistant research scientist at the Gerald R. Ford  School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

NICOLE YADON is an assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

“Sociologists Natasha Quadlin and Brian Powell take us on a well-reasoned, accessible, and engaging journey of how public opinion has changed over time regarding college access and paying for it. Their findings suggest a cultural shift in the American mindset about higher education inequality, and Who Should Pay? merits a strong read to learn what it is and why.”
—Prudence L. Carter, Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology, Brown University

“One of the most pressing issues of today is whether a public college education should be free for every eligible high school graduate, and if so, how will it be funded? This provocative book based on over a thousand adults contacted before and during the pandemic discusses how public views of access and funding of higher education have changed. Addressing problems of individual versus collective interests, this excellent volume raises questions regarding our commitment to future generations of youth, democratic values, and American productivity.”
—Barbara Schneider, John A. Hannah University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University

Americans now obtain college degrees at a higher rate than at any time in recent decades in the hopes of improving their career prospects. At the same time, the rising costs of an undergraduate education have increased dramatically, forcing students and families to take out often unmanageable levels of student debt. The cumulative amount of student debt reached nearly $1.5 trillion in 2017, and calls for student loan forgiveness have gained momentum. Yet public policy to address college affordability has been mixed. While some policymakers support more public funding to broaden educational access, others oppose this expansion. Noting that public opinion often shapes public policy, sociologists Natasha Quadlin and Brian Powell examine public opinion on who should shoulder the increasing costs of higher education and why.

Who Should Pay? draws on a decade’s worth of public opinion surveys analyzing public attitudes about whether parents, students, or the government should be primarily responsible for funding higher education. Quadlin and Powell find that between 2010 and 2019, public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of more government funding. In 2010, Americans overwhelming believed that parents and students were responsible for the costs of higher education. Less than a decade later, the percentage of Americans who believed that federal or state/local government should be the primary financial contributor has more than doubled. The authors also find increased public endorsement of shared responsibility between individuals and the government in paying for higher education. They additionally examine attitudes on the accessibility of college for all, whether higher education at public universities should be free, and whether college is worth the costs.

Quadlin and Powell also explore why Americans hold these beliefs. They identify individualistic and collectivist world views that shape public perspectives on the questions of funding, accessibility, and worthiness of college. Those with more individualistic orientations believed parents and students should pay for college, and that if students want to attend college, then they should work hard and find ways to achieve their goals. Those with collectivist orientations believed in a model of shared responsibility—one in which the government takes a greater level of responsibility for funding education while acknowledging the social and economic barriers to obtaining a college degree for many students. The authors find that these belief systems differ among sociodemographic groups and that bias—sometimes unconscious and sometimes deliberate—regarding race and class affects responses from both individualistic and collectivist-oriented participants.

Public opinion is typically very slow to change. Yet Who Should Pay? provides an illuminating account of just how quickly public opinion has shifted regarding the responsibility of paying for a college education and its implications for future generations of students.

NATASHA QUADLIN is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

BRIAN POWELL is James H. Rudy Professor of Sociology at Indiana University.

This 1925 pamphlet, published by the Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation, gathers suggestions for organizing May Day festivals. An appendix of May Day songs, speeches, and games is included.

Elizabeth Burchenal was inspector of athletics for girls in New York public schools.

This paper, a revised 1917 edition of a 1913 report published by the Department of Child-Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation, offers concise advice on early child-rearing to expectant mothers.

Frances Sage Bradley was chairman for Georgia of the Committee for Public Health Education Among Women of the American Medical Association and state chairman, Publich Health Committee, Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs.

Winner of the 2022 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association

2022 Honorable Mention for the Latino Politics Best Book Prize from the Latino Caucus of the American Political Science Association

“Bringing together the wisdom of sociology, political science, and psychology, States of Belonging finds that state level policies towards immigrants can affect a sense of belonging not only for immigrants but for native-born citizens as well. Utilizing state of the art mixed empirical methods including surveys, experiments, and in-depth interviews, this brilliant study shows that state level policies can have far reaching consequences. The surprising lessons these authors draw from Arizona and New Mexico are important ones for all Americans.”
—Mary C. Waters, PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences and the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

“States of Belonging is a stellar example of collaborative social science research, bringing together experts from sociology, political science, and social psychology to address a critical policy question:  How do a state’s immigration policies affect the lived experience of its residents, both immigrant and U.S.-born? Focusing on Arizona and New Mexico as two contrasting immigration climates, the authors smoothly and skillfully weave together historical context, contemporary policies, experimental data, and subjective reports to show how specific state policies, immigration attitudes, and a personal sense of belonging to state and nation are closely intertwined. Their conclusion that a desire for shared citizenship outweighs presumed differences based on political party or ethnic group is an important message for us to hear, and their case for immigration reform is persuasive and timely.”
—Kay Deaux, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Graduate Center, City University of New York

“If you’ve ever desired a book about immigrant incorporation that is psychologically nuanced, sociologically informed, and politically relevant, States of Belonging is the book for you. Gracefully written by a quartet of leading social scientists, this book provides us with new and revealing insights about the sense of belonging experienced by immigrants and their descendants—and the essential role that individual states play in this process through their own responses to immigration. What is more, they show readers that non-Hispanic whites are also significantly impacted by the degree to which immigrants and their families are welcomed or not by their own state, thus demonstrating a more complicated and often overlooked dynamic in white-Latino relations. Methodologically meticulous and displaying an impressive theoretical range, this volume is likely to change many minds about the extent to which the incorporation of immigrants has implications for us all. It certainly changed mine.”
—Efrén Pérez, Professor of Political Science and Psychology, UCLA

Political turmoil surrounding immigration at the federal level and the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform have provided an opening for state and local governments to become more active in setting their own immigration-related policies. States largely dictate the resources, institutions, and opportunities immigrants can access: who can get a driver’s license or attend a state university, what languages are spoken in schools and public offices, how law enforcement interacts with the public, and even what schools teach students about history. In States of Belonging, an interdisciplinary team of immigration experts—Tomás R. Jiménez, Deborah J. Schildkraut, Yuen J. Huo, and John F. Dovidio—explore the interconnections among immigration policies, attitudes about immigrants and immigration, and sense of belonging in two neighboring states—Arizona and New Mexico—with divergent approaches to welcoming newcomers.

Arizona and New Mexico are historically and demographically similar, but they differ in their immigration policies. Arizona has enacted unwelcoming policies toward immigrants, restricting the access of immigrants to state resources, social services, and public institutions. New Mexico is more welcoming, actively seeking to protect the rights of immigrants and extending access to state resources and institutions. The authors draw on an original survey and in-depth interviews of a cross-section of each state’s population to illustrate how these differing approaches affect the sense of belonging not only among immigrants, but among the U.S.-born as well.

Respondents in Arizona, regardless of whether they were foreign- or native-born or their ethno-racial background, agreed that the state is unwelcoming to immigrants, and they pointed to Arizona’s restrictive policies as the primary factor. The sense of rejection perceived by Latinos in Arizona, including the foreign-born and the U.S.-born, was profound. They felt the effects of administrative and symbolic exclusions of the state’s unwelcoming policies as they went about their daily lives.

New Mexico’s more welcoming approach had positive effects on the Latino immigrant population, and these policies contributed to an increased sense of belonging among U.S.-born Latinos and U.S.-born whites as well. The authors show that exposure to information about welcoming policies is associated with an improved sense of belonging across most population groups. They also find that the primary dividing line when it came to reactions to welcoming policies was political, not ethno-racial. Only self-identified Republicans, Latino as well as white, showed reduced feelings of belonging.

States of Belonging demonstrates that welcoming policies cultivate a greater sense of belonging for immigrants and other state citizens, suggesting that policies aimed at helping immigrants gain a social, economic, and political foothold in this country can pay a broad societal dividend.

TOMÁS R. JIMÉNEZ is professor of sociology at Stanford University.

DEBORAH J. SCHILDKRAUT is pro-fessor of political science at Tufts University.

YUEN J. HUO is professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

JOHN F. DOVIDIO is Carl I. Hovland Professor Emeritus and research professor of psychology at Yale University.

Winner of the C. Herman Pritchett Book Award from the American Political Science Association

Winner of the Virginia Gray Book Award from the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association

“Judging Inequality is an extraordinary achievement. In this empirical tour de force of exceptional transparency using massive new data sets, Gibson and Nelson have produced a seminal and indispensable work on state supreme courts replete with nuanced, compelling, and sometimes surprising results. Bravo!”
—Melinda Gann Hall, Professor of Political Science, MSU Distinguished Faculty Award Winner, and College of Law Faculty Affiliate, Michigan State University

“For too long, political scientists have paid little attention to the state courts relative to their importance in U.S. politics and policy. This pathbreaking book and data by James Gibson and Michael Nelson should ignite such attention. In Judging Inequality, the authors analyze six thousand cases to present compelling evidence on how judicial institutions and judges’ back-grounds shape inequality in the United States today.”
—Brandice Canes-Wrone, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics, Princeton University

“A pathbreaking, first-of-its-kind study of how U.S. state law and courts—purportedly closer to the people themselves than the U.S. Supreme Court—effectively shield powerful economic interests from popular calls for equality and redistribution, Judging Inequality is an exemplary work of social science. James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson’s masterful yet sobering account is a must-read for anyone who harbors hopes for addressing inequality challenges that have plagued American society for generations through strategic litigation at the state court level.”
—Ran Hirschl, Professor of Government and Earl E. Sheffield Regents Chair in Law, University of Texas at Austin

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights.

Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office.

Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth.

Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy.

JAMES L. GIBSON is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis and Professor Extraordinary in Political Science, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

MICHAEL J. NELSON is Jeffery L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor in Political Science and associate professor of political science at the Pennsylvania State University.