ACS Book Club

The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace

The information revolution has ushered in a data-driven reorganization of the workplace. In The Quantified Worker, author Ifeoma Ajunwa explores how the workforce science of today goes far beyond increasing efficiency and threatens to erase individual personhood. With exhaustive detail, she shows how different forms of worker quantification are enabled, facilitated, and driven by technological advances. Timely and eye-opening, The Quantified Worker advocates for changes in the law that will mitigate the ill effects of the modern workplace.

Poverty, By America

In Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond shows how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Poverty, By America provides new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem and its solutions.

Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence

Break the Wheel is a riveting account of the Derek Chauvin trial, in which Attorney General Keith Ellison takes the reader down the path his prosecutors took, offering different breakthroughs and revelations for a defining, generational moment of racial reckoning and social justice understanding. The book goes spoke to spoke along the wheel of the system as Attorney General Ellison examines the roles of prosecutors, defendants, heads of police unions, judges, activists, legislators, politicians, and media figures, each in his attempt to end this chain of violence and replace it with empathy and shared insight. Watch Attorney General Ellison discuss Break the Wheel during the 2023 ACS National Convention.

American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

American Whitelash examines the cyclical pattern of violence that has marred every moment of racial progress in this country, and whose bloodshed began anew following Obama’s 2008 election. Wesley Lowery uncovers how this vicious cycle is carrying us into ever more perilous territory, how the federal government has failed to intervene, and how we still might find a route of escape.

The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic

Since 2017, the Supreme Court has dramatically expanded its use of the behind-the-scenes “shadow docket,” regularly making decisions that affect millions of Americans without public hearings and without explanation. In his new bookThe Shadow Docket, Stephen Vladeck offers a comprehensive historical and contemporary look at how the Supreme Court uses these unsigned and unexplained orders to create substantive effects in the law, and the ways in which the current justices are abusing their power in such cases in ways that raise serious questions about the Court’s legitimacy. Listen to Stephen Vladeck discuss The Shadow Docket on a recent Broken Law episode.