Race, it is widely understood, is a social category that has no genetic basis, yet biological notions of race keep reemerging. In The Uses of Diversity: How Race Has Become Entangled in Law, Politics, and Biology (Columbia University Press), Professor Jonathan Kahn argues that this predicament arises from a surprising source: the concept of diversity.

“We’re now seeing that diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice,” says Kahn, who points out that the entanglement of race and biology does not always serve a single political script or produce reliably conservative or liberal results. “It is in unknotting the entanglements that we gain insights into how diversity can be used in ways to reinforce or dismantle racial hierarchies.”

Professor Daniel Medwed and co-author Kevin McMunigal have penned the third edition of their casebook, Criminal Law: Problems, Statutes, and Cases (Carolina Academic Press), which combines effective, innovative teaching methods, such as the use of problems and visual materials, with cases, including recent opinions on bias intimidation, threatening speech on social media, possession of child pornography and theft of computer code. “I always enjoy revising our book to account for new and interesting developments in the law and to incorporate recent, high-profile cases that resonate with students,” said Medwed, the author of several books, including Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison.