Humanities & Society

Two students in John Inazu’s first-year “Criminal Law” class embodied the lessons taught during the class about theories of punishment, questions of whether criminal justice can remedy injustice and issues of equity in sentencing.

Adia Harvey Wingfield’s new book exposes how hospitals, clinics and other institutions participate in “racial outsourcing,” relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians and physician assistants to do “equity work”— extra labor that makes organizations more accessible to communities of color.

Consumers who take advantage of nonprofit credit counseling services have statistically significant reductions in consumer debt, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Policy approaches such as tuition-free primary education and paid parental leave both transform norms and improve health for women and their children, finds a new study co-authored by Jessica Levy, associate professor of practice at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) accused the Trump administration of “running concentration camps on our southern border,” a political firestorm erupted. But a question remained. Was the comparison justified? Arts & Sciences historian Anika Walke, a scholar of the Holocaust, offers perspective.

The Supreme Court’s June 27 decision to kill all federal constitutional complaints about partisan gerrymandering is a tremendous loss for our democratic process, says a constitutional law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, has been selected as the 23rd U.S. poet laureate, a move that will inspire Native Americans throughout the country, says Kellie Thompson, director of the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

On that historic day 243 years ago, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. But it would be weeks before the Founding Fathers would actually sign the handwritten document now housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, official broadsides — one of which is showcased at Washington University in St. Louis — were printed and posted on the doors of courthouses across the nation.

In the United States, almost 50,000 people die every year from suicide. While participating in a June 13 briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., a Washington University in St. Louis expert testified that — amid the need nationally to stem violence in schools and elsewhere — suicide remains preventable.