Christopher Schmidt is professor of law and associate dean for faculty development at Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he also codirects the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a faculty fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Schmidt, one of our most talented young legal historians, has written an engaging and fast-paced narrative of one of the civil rights movement's epic events: the sit-in demonstrations. Thoroughly researched and convincingly argued, Schmidt's book is a model of the 'new' legal history: He demonstrates how ordinary Americans shape the development of constitutional law and how the sundry interactions of diverse institutions influence constitutional change in unpredictable ways. The sit-in movement finally has the legal history it deserves. --Michael Klarman, Harvard Law School, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality