At last...the public hearing she was denied...These essays reveal keen powers of analysis applied to some of the most obdurate problems that bedevil electoral politics. Anyone who cares about the mechanisms of democracy should be engaged by her tough-minded explorations. It doesn't matter where you think you stand: it's all here, to argue or agree with.
-- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Lani Guinier's fascinating book is a prophetic intervention into a public conversation we desperately need to rejuvenate. There is no doubt that her powerful voice will produce good consequences for our...

Why do we care more about winning than about playing by the rules?

Integrity - all of us are in favor of it, but nobody seems to know how to make sure that we get it. From presidential candidates to crusading journalists to the lords of collegiate sports, everybody promises to deliver integrity, yet all too often, the promises go unfulfilled.

Stephen Carter examines why the virtue of integrity holds such sway over the American political imagination. By weaving together insights from philosophy, theology, history and law, along with examples drawn from current events and a dose of...

The Culture Of Disbelief has been the subject of an enormous amount of media attention from the first moment it was published. Hugely successful in hardcover, the Anchor paperback is sure to find a large audience as the ever-increasing, enduring debate about the relationship of church and state in America continues. In The Culture Of Disbelief, Stephen Carter explains how we can preserve the vital separation of church and state while embracing rather than trivializing the faith of millions of citizens or treating religious believers with disdain. What makes Carter's work so...

Stephen Carter argues that American politics is unimaginable without America's religious voice. Using contemporary and historical examples, from abolitionist sermons to presidential candidates' confessions, he illustrates ways in which religion and politics do and do not mesh well and ways in which spiritual perspectives might make vital contributions to our national debates. He also warns us of the importance of setting out some sensible limits, so that religious institutions do not allow themselves to be seduced by the lure of temporal power, and offers strong examples of principled and...

The author of the provocative books The Culture of Disbelief and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby sheds new light on the process that has manufactured such public fiascoes as the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Lani Guinier travesty. "A lesson in the perils of the reforming spirit."-- Commentary.

In a climate where whites who criticize affirmative action risk being termed racist and blacks who do the same risk charges of treason and self hatred, a frank and open discussion of racial preference is difficult to achieve. But, in the first book on racial preference written from personal experience, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Stephen L. Carter, Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University and self-described beneficiary (and, at times, victim) of affirmative action, does it.Using his own story of success and frustration as "an affirmative action baby" as a point of...

This text defends dialogue that negotiates conflict and keeps democracy alive, and at the same time it protrays America as dying from a refusal to engage in such a dialogue, a polity where everybody speaks, but nobody listens. It diagnoses the ailment of the body politic as the unwillingness of people in power to hear disagreement unless forced to, and precribes a new process of response. At the heart of this work is a re-reading of the Declaration of Independence that puts dissent, not consent, at the centre of the question of legitimacy of democratic government. The author argues that...

Stephen Carter takes us back to the New England university town of Elm Harbor where the murder of a renowned African-American economist opens a door on the racial complications of the town's past, on one family's secrets, and on the most hidden and powerful bastions of African-American political influence.