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The simple act of four college students sitting down at a store’s lunch counter in the hope of being served food helped to pave the way for one of America’s most influential legal achievements. In 1960 this “simple act” was anything but, as the four students were African American and chose to sit down at a whites-only lunch counter, one of the spaces that was segregated during that time. Their “sit-in” and many other such quiet protests that followed led to the passage of the .

In his new book , �糵����-Kent College of Law describes this first famous demonstration and explores the topics of constitutional rights and injustice, among others. An Illinois Tech faculty member since 2008, Schmidt won two competitions for his article “,” which served as a foundation for his book. He received the 2014 Scholarly Papers Competition from the Association of American Law Schools and the 2016 Surrency Prize from the American Society for Legal History.