ADAM COHEN

Author, Journalist, Lawyer

COMING NOVEMBER 2025, MY NEXT BOOK: CAPTAIN’S DINNER: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History



My most recent book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America — which argues that the Supreme Court has been a major driver of our nation’s inequality — is out in paperback from Penguin Press. My book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck — about the 1927 case in which the Supreme Court endorsed eugenics and forced sterilization — is also out in paperback. You can read more about, and order, them here.

I’ve written about law, inequality, voting rights, books, and other subjects, for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the Atlantic, BallsandStrikes.com, and other publications — a selection of those articles is here. And I have been on NPR’s Fresh Air discussing Supreme Inequality (here), Imbeciles (here), and my previous book American Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley’s Battle for Chicago and the Nation (here). I also co-edit an online book review.

My Books

Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (Penguin Press, 2020). A look at the past 50 years of the Supreme Court, showing how in areas from education to employment to criminal justice it has been making our nation more unequal. 

Read more about it here.

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin Press, 2016). A look at Buck v. Buck, the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that praised eugenics, upheld forced sterilization, and approved the sterilization of young Carrie Buck.

**Banned from classrooms and libraries in Indian River, Florida — Pen America, “Banned in the USA” (2022)

Read more about it here.

Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (Penguin Press 2008). The story of the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and five close advisors who helped save the nation from the Depression and built the modern federal government.

Read more about it here.

The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (Little Brown 2002). An inside account of the creation and rise of the online auction site eBay, written with access to all of the company’s founders and early employees.

Read more about it here.

American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Little Brown, 2000). A biography of Chicago’s iconic mayor and political boss that explores how he built Chicago into a major metropolis — and the most segregated large city in America.

Read more about it here.

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