Every Monday, I Visit Prisoners at Heathrow

One of the World’s Largest Airports Is Also Home to Detained Immigrants Stuck in Limbo

Every Monday, come 2 p.m. I’m usually ready in my seat in the Visitor’s Lock, unless there’s been a long wait to get fingerprinted and frisked. I then wait for Hormoz (not his real name) to get picked up from his cell on the wing and brought up. Weekday afternoons are normally pretty quiet here in the Lock, where family and friends sit on plastic chairs at plastic tables, both bolted to the floor, as they keep an eye on the door through which the detainees enter.

Two of the U.K.’s …

The Women of the American West Don’t Take No for an Answer

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Girl Scouts USA CEO Anna Maria Chávez on Being Historic ‘Firsts’—and Native Arizonans

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Girl Scouts USA CEO Anna Maria Chávez both grew up in rural Arizona. Both went on to become lawyers. And both were historic “firsts.” O’Connor …

How Do We Put Fewer Californians in Prison?

From Texas and Mississippi to New York and Georgia, Other States Are Finding Alternatives to Incarceration

In 2009, overcrowding in California’s prisons had gotten so bad—140,000 inmates crammed into prisons built to house just 80,000—that federal judges ruled it violated prisoners’ civil rights. Under order to …

Journalist Dayo Olopade

I Can Make a Frittata Out of Anything

Journalist Dayo Olopade is the author of The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. She is currently a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale University, …

Was Fred Phelps Democracy’s Necessary Evil?

You Don’t Have to Like the Man or the Westboro Baptist Church, But Their Antics Strengthened the First Amendment for All of Us

It has been written that the safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. If that is true—and the facts support the premise—then the …

USC Legal Scholar Jody David Armour

A Guy From the Golden Age of Funk

Jody David Armour is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. He studies the relationship between racial justice, criminal justice, and the rule of …