Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness, The New Press, 2012, 304 p., ISBN 978-1595586438

Among social historians of law there is currently a keen interest in popular legalism, i.e. in the active role that ordinary people played in the judiciary and how these people experienced the law. These new strands of research takes the view that ordinary people were not necessarily the victims of legal regimes imposed upon them from above. Instead, historians increasingly highlight the ways in which ordinary people shaped the judiciary. This historiographical shift includes growing attentio...