Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice

Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight--until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn't commit. The Volokh Conspiracy calls Butler's account of his trial "the most riveting first chapter I have ever read."

In a book Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree calls "a must read," Butler looks at places where ordinary citizens meet the justice system--as jurors, witnesses, and in encounters with the police--and explores what "doing the right thing" means in a corrupt system.

Since Let's Get Free's publication in spring 2009, Butler has become the go-to person for commentary on criminal justice and race relations: he appeared on ABC News, Good Morning America, and Fox News, published op-eds in the New York Times and other national papers, and is in demand to speak across the country. The paperback edition brings Butler's groundbreaking and highly controversial arguments--jury nullification (voting "not guilty" in drug cases as a form of protest), just saying "no" when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the system as a snitch or a prosecutor--to a whole new audience.


Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Butler, Paul
Published: 06/01/2010
Publisher: New Press
ISBN: 9781595585004
Pages: 214
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 0.60d