Bad Law

Bad Law, a New York Times bestseller by Elie Mystal, offers a brilliant takedown of ten shocking pieces of legislation that continue to perpetuate hate, racial bias, injustice, and inequality today. This is an urgent yet hopeful read for our current political climate.

Mystal is described as a grassroots legal superhero, with a superpower of explaining to the masses, in clear language, the all-too-human forces at play behind the making of our laws. Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop, praises his work.

In Bad Law, Mystal reimagines what our legal system, and society at large, could look like if we could move past legislation plagued by racism, misogyny, and corruption. Through accessible yet detailed prose and trenchant wit, Mystal argues that these egregiously awful laws—his "Bill of Wrongs"—continue to cause systematic and individual harm and should be repealed completely.

By exposing the flawed foundations of the rules we live by, and through biting humour and insight, Bad Law offers a crisp, pertinent take on:

• Abortion and the Hyde Amendment, and the role federal funding, or lack thereof, has played in depriving women of necessary health and reproductive care.
• Immigration and illegal reentry, and the illusions that have been sold to us regarding immigration policy, reform, and whiteness at large.
• Voter registration laws, and how the right to vote has become a moral issue, and ironically, antidemocratic.
• Gun control and the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, and the extreme yet obvious dangers of granting immunity to gun manufacturers.

As the man Samantha Bee calls "irrepressible and righteously indignant" and Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion calls "the funniest lawyer in America," Mystal points out that these laws do not come to us from on high; we write them, and we can and should unwrite them. In a fierce, funny, and wholly original takedown spanning all the hot-button topics in the country today, one of our most brilliant legal thinkers points the way to a saner tomorrow.