Historians have often marveled at the sheer quantity, and deeply personal tone, of the letters that Americans sent to the White House during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. After 1939, they also sent letters to the Department of Justice's newly formed Civil Liberties Unit (known now by its subsequent appellation, the Civil Rights Section (CRS)). A sample of more than a thousand such letters, most from 1939 and 1940, is the heart of this engaging book. Political scientist George I. Lovell uses this sample to show how Americans appropriated legal discourses and demanded a better legal order, while demonstrating a realistic understanding of law's limitations. He thereby suggests the capacity of ordinary people “to draw on and resist law's power as ideology” (26).

In making this claim, Lovell joins a rich conversation among socio-legal scholars about the legal practices and consciousness of society's nonelite. The freshness of Lovell's contribution comes from the slice of society that his sources capture: actors who were not engaged in litigation or organized social movements, but were nonetheless willing to challenge authority. Letter writers also represent various regions, races, education levels, and classes. Lovell's argument is less novel, but important. In response to scholars who emphasize the conservative and constraining aspects of legal discourse, Lovell shows the imaginative ways in which letter writers deployed legal language. They claimed benefits and protections, some unusual (the right to earn a living as a painter) and some deeply grounded in American history (fair treatment by law enforcement). They also communicated aspirations, refuted unjust laws, and attempted to provoke officials into reflection and action.

Many more aspects of this book deserve praise, including Lovell's illuminating use of quotations and his analysis of the extralegal arguments that accompanied invocations of law. A few critiques deserve mention, however. Scholars of race may perceive an overemphasis on unconventional civil rights claims. As Lovell concedes, correspondence from Deep South states was absent from the archive he sampled, and CRS officials sent peonage claims to a different file, leaving concerns about race almost certainly underrepresented. Historians may quibble with Lovell's willingness to leap from letter writers in 1939 to ordinary people today. Government in the late 1930s – especially the federal government – actively intervened in everyday life, and also demanded much of citizens. Along similar lines, one might wish for more attention to the writers' imagined recipient. Surely there was a difference between writing to Eleanor Roosevelt and writing to the CRS. Lovell's analysis does not differentiate between letters addressed to the CRS and letters routed to it.

Overall, however, Lovell deserves credit for so thoroughly mining this unique source base, in ways that disrupt conventional narratives and suggest new research questions. For example, Lovell leaves for future scholars the responses of CRS officials. As the book's title suggests, these officials often responded to letters by declaiming jurisdiction (even as they asserted jurisdiction over similar cases in court). With our enriched understanding of nonelite uses of legal discourse, we might explore how administrators drew on these claims (or ignored them) in their work as interpreters, mediators, and shapers of formal law.