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A virtual author talk with Laura Coates, CNN legal analyst and author of Just Pursuit.
Join the Library and Mahogany Books for a conversation with former prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Laura Coates for her new book Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness. In conversation with CNN’s Abby Philip, Coates will discuss her career as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice. Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.
This is a virtual event. We will livestream this discussion to our Youtube page. Watch directly below.
About the book:
When Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.”
Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just.
On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it—for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire.
Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.
About Abby Philip: Abby Phillip is CNN's senior political correspondent and anchor of Inside Politics Sunday, an hour-long in-depth conversation on the week's most important political storylines, with a diverse set of analysts and news-making interviews. She joined the network in 2017 to cover the Trump Administration and served as White House Correspondent through 2019. In January 2020, she moderated CNN's Democratic Presidential Debate in Iowa. She also anchored special coverage of Election Night in America surrounding the 2020 election, which lasted several days until CNN was the first news outlet to project Joe Biden as the winner. In January 2021, she anchored the CNN Special Report: Kamala Harris: Making History about the Vice President's barrier-breaking career and the child
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Author Talk |
