This Week’s Featured Resource: Just Mercy - A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Just Mercy tells the story of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned. It was founded to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice and to address the nation’s highest death sentencing and execution rates.

Bryan Stevenson is a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law and the founder and Executive of EJI. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and more. Stevenson led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites which opened in 2018: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.

Access a print copy of Just Mercy through the Biddle Library or an electronic version through the Van Pelt Library. The Just Mercy film came out in 2019 and is also available through the Van Pelt Library.

Visit E&I’s resource page for additional highlights and to access anti-racism resources provided by the Law School’s library.

Our Community Toolbox showcases a new resource each week – highlighting a range of books, podcasts, movies, and more, to aid in our collective efforts to be better-informed advocates as we advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the Law School and beyond.