The justices forbid their current clerks to talk to the press, and most former clerks refuse to discuss the work they performed for living justices in any detail. But Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden received responses from 122 former clerks to a question concerning the drafting of opinions for their 2006 book “Sorcerers’ Apprentices.” Thirty percent of the clerks said their drafts had been issued without modification at least some of the time.

Reviewing the book in The New Republic, Judge Posner, a close student of the court, wrote that “probably more than half the written output of the court is clerk-authored.”

Salon.com sat down with Aaron Kupchik, the author of Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear. The author was also featured on WAMC’s The Roundtable – download the podcast here.

You spent a lot of time in each of the four schools. What are the police officers like who patrol these schools?

They were great. I really enjoyed the time that I spent with them. These are people who care about kids and who work hard for little money to do the right thing. I might disagree with what they do and how they do it, but not with their motives. But their role is an odd one for schools. They don’t have a counseling background, and they are just not able to deal with kids’ problems the way that some of these problems need. Their day-to-day experience trains them and socializes them to deal with kids in not the most productive manner. And their presence in schools creates a law-and-order mindset to govern schools rather than the type of counseling and democratic mindset that we know prevents crime.

There’s still very much a public perception that crime, violence and drugs are on the rise in schools. Has the addition of school resource officers been effective at all?

The jury’s still out on whether they’ve led to a decrease in crime. There have been big decreases in crime, but it’s unlikely that the SROs have had an effect on that. There have been only a few studies that have tried to look at effectiveness, and they’ve been totally mixed. What we do know about preventing crime in schools is that when you have a more democratic and inclusive school, you tend to have less crime. A democratic and inclusive school is one where students feel respected, they feel like they’re a part of a school, and where a school deals with students’ problems rather than just dismissing them. It’s one where the students feel empowered. SROs and zero-tolerance policies do the opposite of this; they erode what we know works.

The Columbine shooting is often invoked as a justification for zero-tolerance policies. But what kinds of changes did Columbine High adopt in the wake of the shootings?

Columbine is central to the way we think about school security. It redefined the tragedy of school crime in a very dramatic way. In the wake of it, what Columbine High did was quite sensible. They invested in counselors. They recognized that kids who do bad things in school are usually kids who have very serious troubles, and so rather than simply kicking them out of school for a week, they tried to reach out to kids who are dealing with difficult issues — to solve problems rather than just delaying them for a week while the kid’s out of school. They turned away from the more zero-tolerance type of policies and toward what I think is a much more effective way of trying to deal with things.

From the moment Dr. King stepped onto the national stage during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, until he fell to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, political conservatives despised him. In the South, they hated him for trying to end de jure discrimination, and outside of Dixie, they loathed him for trying to end de facto discrimination. As the leading voice of the civil rights movement, Dr. King represented everything that political conservatives opposed.

In the 1980s, political conservatives began to embrace Dr. King, turning to him for moral cover as they waged war against affirmative action and other race-based efforts designed to remedy past and present racial discrimination.

Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, was the key to their about-face. During Dr. King’s most famous speech, he articulated his dream of a colorblind society, one in which his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Political conservatives latched on to Dr. King’s speech, trumpeting his words as evidence that he opposed race-based solutions to race-based problems when in fact he supported them vehemently. Indeed, they re-wrote history – their own history and that of the civil rights movement – as they endeavored to preserve the last vestiges of white privilege.

Today, political conservatives, led by media showmen such as Glenn Beck, are once again turning to Dr. King to deflect charges of racism as they advance their agenda by questioning, among other things, the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president. To mask their own racism, they have turned history on its head, bastardizing Dr. King’s dream.

Political conservatives are not the heirs to Dr. King’s legacy, and to suggest otherwise is not just fanciful, but farcical. Unfortunately, too many Americans don’t know enough about history to separate fact from fiction.

The central lesson of genealogy is both banal and profound: We are all related. The human race is a sea of distant cousins separated only by geography and circumstance. OK, so what? Making this biological fact meaningful is the challenge facing any writer attempting family history. Typically, the project takes one of two forms: a specific story of an individual family (as in the case of Edward Ball’s “Slaves in the Family’’) or a global approach to human evolution (Spencer Wells’s “The Journey of Man’’). In “Faces of America,’’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. has found a middle path: He applies the most rigorous genealogical and genetic tools to the family histories of 12 ethnically distinct Americans, and in doing so touches on the history of not only these individuals but on the human race itself. For anyone who enjoyed Gates’s popular PBS programs “African American Lives” or the NBC series “Who Do You Think You Are?”, “Faces of America,’’ based on a second Gates TV project, will serve as another enjoyable and educational installment of America’s newest pastime: celebrity genealogy.

Gates’s breezy, intimate style and obvious affection for his subjects results in a book that is the bionic version of that old fourth-grade family tree assignment, thanks to the support of a world-class Rolodex and Harvard researchers and geneticists. It’s fun.”

In the humanities, in which the monograph has been king, there is more inertia. “We have never done it that way before,” should be academia’s motto, said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College.

Ms. Fitzpatrick was a founder of the MediaCommons network in 2007. She posted chapters of her own book “Planned Obsolescence” on the site, and she used the comments readers provided to revise the manuscript for NYU Press. She also included the project in the package she presented to the committee that promoted her to full professor this year.

Anis Shivani at the Huffington Post lists the 17 Most Innovative University Presses, and NYU is first on the list.

There are few subjects more important today than civil liberties in the age of terror, and NYU Press takes a backseat to no one in this field of study. Forthcoming titles of particular interest include Marjorie Cohn’s The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse; Jonathan Hafetz’s Habeas Corpus After 9/11; Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain’s When Governments Break the Law: The Rule of Law and the Prosecution of the Bush Administration; David Garland et al.’s America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present; Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland’s Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality; and Michael Perelman’s The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers.

Title IX was signed into law almost 40 years ago, yet it is still often misrepresented and unfairly condemned. Bill speaks with University of Pittsburgh law professor Deborah Brake, author of Getting in the Game, about how the law has changed female athletics and what still can be done to encourage more girls to play sports.

Kupchik’s detailed observations of four public high schools with vastly different student bodies paint a convincing picture of good intentions gone awry. In trying to keep kids safe, these schools — our schools — are rendering them even more vulnerable, not only to crime but to disillusionment, disenfranchisement, and ultimately to a passive acceptance of heavy-handed policing, limitations on free speech, ubiquitous video surveillance, and other intrusions on civil liberties.

This is a book that deserves a wider audience than it likely will get. As Kupchik points out, what our students learn about crime, punishment, justice, and liberty is crucial to the society we’ll all inhabit as today’s graduates leave school behind.

Aaron will appear on WAMC’s “The Roundtable” (Albany NPR) this Wednesday, 8/18.

Here’s Dr. Longmore giving an inspiring and informative speech about the history of the Disability Rights Movement, and its most important goal, redefining what “disability” means.

Great leaders do not create great movements. Great movements give rise to great leaders. . . No movement can exist without in this case millions of ordinary men and women asserting themselves to demand dignity and their rights. So that’s what our movement is all about. That’s our past. That’s our present. That’s our future.

Here’s a very thorough round-up of tributes and memorials.

Professor Badgett will be taking questions about the book and her testimony at Fire Dog Lake’s Book Salon this week. The discussion is already quite lively.