So summer is coming to a close for those of us in the seemingly Sisyphean task of law school: I’m pretty sure this will be the three longest years of my life. Summer was an opportunity to not only get in some practice doing actual legal work but to try to read my way through a lot of new books. While articles and blogs are usually more up-to-date than books, I value books and writings like law review and other journal articles for the clarity and depth of the thought. I understand it isn’t for everyone, especially our comrades with dyslexia and other challenges to reading as a medium, but for those of you who are bookworms like me I thought I’d provide a syllabus of writings I think are worth reading this year.

Colonialism

– Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

– Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Economics

– Caren Grown and Gita Sen, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions

– David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

– Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital

– Karl Marx, Capital

– Michael Roberts, The Long Depression

– Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. Shaikh has posted his lectures on the book on youtube, very useful for those of us who cannot afford such an expensive book.

Feminism

– Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

– Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

– Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

– Catherine MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women

– Obioma Nnaemeka, Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way

– Filomina Chioma Steady, Women and Collective Action in Africa

History

– Ibn Battuta et al, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa

– Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham

– George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution. You can watch Mr. Ciccariello-Maher talk about his book here.

– Simon Clarke et al, What About the Workers?

– Gord Hill, 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

– Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Law

– Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court

– Howard Engelskirchen, Capital as a Social Kind

– Ann Fagan Ginger et al, Undoing the Bush-Cheney Legacy

– Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism

– Amy J. Schmitz, Nonconsensual + Nonbinding = Nonsensical? Reconsidering Court-Connected Arbitration Programs, 10 Cardozo J. Conflict Resol. 587

– Elizabeth Warren, What is a Women’s Issue? Bankruptcy, Commercial Law, and Other Gender-Neutral Topics, 25 Harv. Women’s L.J. 19

Political Theory

– Black Panthers, Ten Point Program

– Fredriech Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

– Kris Hermes, Crashing the Party. I did an interview of Kris for the NLG’s podcast Motion to Resist!

– George Jackson, Blood in My Eye

– Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

– Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

– Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions

Sociology

– Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital

– Dahr Jamail, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan

– John King, The Football Factory

– Emily Van Der Meulen et al, Selling Sex

– Robert Walser et al, Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History