Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness

About the Book

A powerful true story and groundbreaking account of bias in the courtroom from CNN Chief Legal Analyst Laura Coates, recounting her time as a Black female prosecutor for the US Department of Justice.

In this urgent, timely, and deeply personal debut, Just Pursuit exposes the bias in the justice system from the perspective of a Black female federal prosecutor at the US Department of Justice. Through the prism of Laura Coates’s experience, first as a voting-rights attorney in the Civil Rights Division and then as a federal prosecutor as an Assistant United States Attorney in Washington DC, we see a system that perpetuates bias and unfairness. Coates finds herself constantly torn between upholding her oath as a public servant, honored by the opportunity to represent the people of the United States, and at odds with her principles and lived experience as a Black woman and mother. It challenged her very notions of justice.

On the front lines of our legal system, she sees how Black communities are policed differently; Black crimes are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How Black men are not given the very benefit of the doubt that is demanded by police officers; and how the court system seems to be the one place where minorities seem to be overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belies their percentage in the population. She is unwilling to look away from the hardest moments of her career, often caught between wanting to protect the Black community and her duty to serve, moments which question the very underpinning of who the justice system serves.

Now a Chief Legal Analyst and Anchor at CNN, Laura distills how the law intersects with modern civil rights every day. Through these reflective, confessional, and captivating scenes in the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the lived reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, revealing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.