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Best-selling author John Green tells the story of a young TB patient in Sierra Leone and systems of injustice fueling the world's deadliest infectious disease.

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, legal scholar Ellie Mistal,

says if it were up to him, every law passed before 1965 would be deemed unconstitutional.

From his view, before the Voting Rights Act, the U.S. was basically an apartheid state.

Mistal's new book, Bad Law, Ten Popular Laws that

are ruining America, mixes humor with deep analysis to argue that our laws on immigration,

religious freedom, abortion, and voting rights are actually making life worse than better.

They've caused, he argues, massive social and political harm and don't reflect the will

of most Americans. Ellie Mistal is a legal analyst and justice correspondent for the nation,

and the legal editor of the more perfect podcast on the Supreme Court for Radio Lab. He's also

an Alfred Knobler fellow at Tight Media Center and the author of Allow Me to Rort,

A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution. And Ellie Mistal, as you always seem to do, you've made this subject both funny and informational.

So we'll be laughing today to keep from crying. Thank you so much for this book and welcome to fresh air.

Thank you so much for having me, Tanya fresh air. Thank you so much for having me,

Tanya. Okay. So in each chapter of the book, you give an analysis of a law that you say is

ruining America. There are 10 of them. How did you go about choosing which laws to focus on?

That was the most difficult part of writing this book because, as you can imagine, there are a lot of laws.

Yes.

Many of them are stupid.

And I did not read them all.

...