Charles Lane Guest-Blogging This Week:

I'm delighted to say that Charles Lane will be guest-blogging this week about his new book, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. The book tells the story of the mass murder of more than five dozen black men in 1873 Louisiana; the federal prosecution of the killers led to the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), a landmark decision that (among other things) held that neither the First nor the Second Amendment applied to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment.

Charles covered the Court for the Washington Post from 2000 to 2006, and edited The New Republic from 1997 to 1999.