Whose Justice? Storytelling, Power, & the Limits of the Law

The Racial Justice Clinic and Student Bar Association invite you to join award winning journalists Justine van der Leun and Rick Tulsky in conversation with USF Law alumnus David Weiss ’90, Partner, Reed Smith LLP and 2024 Recipient of the Hon. Saundra Brown Armstrong ’77 Alumni Award, to discuss their new books exploring how race, gender, and power shape whose stories are believed and how justice is administered. 

Justine van der Leun’s book, Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence,  Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival (2026), examines how the legal system punishes women for acts committed in response to abuse. Drawing on seven years of reporting inside U.S. prisons and more than 1,000 accounts from incarcerated women, it follows three of those women closely, using their stories to examine who the law protects, who it punishes, and how the line between victim and defendant is drawn.

Rick Tulsky’s book, Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom (2026), tells the story of Lamonte McIntyre, a Black teenager who was wrongfully convicted of a double murder in Kansas City, Kansas, and spent 23 years in prison. Through McIntyre’s case, Tulsky traces a much larger story of institutional failure and corruption involving police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the courts — and the extraordinary effort to uncover the truth and secure McIntyre’s freedom.

Books will be available for purchase.