New Books in Law (New Books Network)

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields ranging from computer science and law to philosophy and cognitive science, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2022) offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues such as transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation. Both business and government have integrated algorithmic decision support systems into their daily operations, and the book explores the implications for our lives as citizens. For example, do we take it on faith that a machine knows best in approving a patient's health insurance claim or a defendant's request for bail? What is the potential for manipulation by targeted political ads? How can the processes behind these technically sophisticated tools ever be transparent? The book discusses such issues as statistical definitions of fairness, legal and moral responsibility, the role of humans in machine learning decision systems, “nudging” algorithms and anonymized data, the effect of automation on the workplace, and AI as both regulatory tool and target. Dr John Zerilli is a philosopher with particular interests in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the law. He is currently a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Immigration in the 21st Century: The Comparative Politics of Immigration Policy (Routledge, 2020) is an excellent primer for those looking to understand the complexities of immigration not only as a policy arena, but the study of immigration and migration, and to get a sense of the different approaches to immigration from a variety of kinds of countries. Terri Givens, Rachel Navarre, and Pete Mohanty have written a sophisticated and accessible text that would be of interest to anyone who wants to learn a bit more about immigration. The authors explain the different approaches to immigration taken by different countries, depending on the historical and political contexts of those countries. They group countries together into categories, with defining characteristics that contribute to the form and shape of the immigration policies that have been implemented. Attention is paid to the post-World War II European shifts in immigration and policies that provided avenues for workers to help with the rebuilding of places like Germany and France. There is also a discussion of the way that globalization has contributed to the evolution of immigration processes, and how migration is also participating in the shape of newer policies and political responses. In our conversation, Givens explains the way that sovereignty and nation building provide the framing for immigration policies and how nations think about those whom they allow to become citizens. Immigration in the 21st Century provides an understanding of immigration from a practical perspective, contextualizing it in the world that came out of World War II. This book also integrates the role that the Cold War played in both immigration and migration during the period of tension between the East and the West, and then what happened after the end of the Cold War. In our conversation, Givens notes the differences between immigration, which is generally a public and political policy that a nation puts into place, and migration, which follows the flow of people from one place to another place, often because of a triggering event, like war and conflict, or climate change. We also discuss the different policies that govern the trade of goods across borders and the more complicated nature of implementing policies that govern the movement of people across borders. Immigration in the 21st Century is a useful and thoughtful analysis of the complexities of immigration in the modern world. Terri Givens also has a website devoted to the book itself and updating information about immigration. Here is the link to that website, which also includes a coupon for a discount on the book: https://www.terrigivens.com/immigration/ Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffery Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing customers with cheap goods and speedy delivery. Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy (Princeton University Press, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of American retail capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today, uncovering the roots of a bitter equilibrium where large low-cost retailers dominate and vast numbers of low-income families now rely on them to make ends meet. Offering a comparative perspective on the history of American political economy, Dr. Kathleen Thelen shows how large-scale retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden faced a far less hospitable regulatory environment than companies in the United States, which enjoyed judicial forbearance and often active government support. As American companies grew in scale and scope, they assembled an ever-expanding political coalition that could be weaponized to head off regulatory efforts, leveraging their market strength to squeeze suppliers and workers and even engaging in outright rule breaking when they encountered resistance. Placing the rise of the Amazon economy in a broader comparative-historical context, Attention, Shoppers! reveals how large discount retailers have successfully exploited a uniquely permissive regulatory landscape to create a shopper’s paradise built on cheap labor and mass consumption. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Undocumented youth activists are at the forefront of the present-day immigrant rights movement. This is especially true surrounding the activism of the recent SCOTUS decision on DACA issued on June 18, 2020. Professor Kevin Escudero’s book, Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism Under the Law (New York University Press, 2020), depicts just how undocumented immigrant youth have utilized their identities for political action between 2010-2019. By developing what he calls the “Identity Mobilization Model,” Escudero studies the intersectional collective identity formation of undocumented immigrant communities by focusing on how micro-level processes interact with macro-level legal structures.   Escudero uses intimate narrative accounts of individual experiences, community gatherings, and organizer meetings to show how undocumented immigrant youth activists emphasized the heterogeneity of the movement while also forming coalitions with other movements. Escudero drew on ethnographic participant observation and fifty-one in-depth interviews with undocumented youth activists in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. The book covers three subgroups within the immigrant rights movement: undocumented Asian activists, undocumented queer activists, and formerly undocumented activists. Each chapter focuses on one of the three subgroups and details how the subgroup shared community knowledge, how they leveraged their intersectional movement identity, and what he observed as high-stakes allyship.   Organizing While Undocumented shows how undocumented immigrants “have organized powerful countermobilizations to resist the stigma of illegality”. Further, Escudero carefully describes how undocumented youth form an oppositional consciousness informed by articulations of nuanced historical narratives and their participation in the immigrant rights movement. Overall, Organizing While Undocumented is in direct conversation with academic discussions of migrant illegality, social movement activism, and intersectionality. This book should be read by scholars interested in those fields as well as activists and allies of the immigrant rights movement.    Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1950” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. Jonathan is currently a Ford Predoctoral Fellow as well as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and on their personal website www.historiancortez.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Is the Indo-Pacific already the most dominant in terms of global power, politics, and wealth? In his newest book, Michael R. Auslin considers the key issues facing the Indo-Pacific which have ramifications for the entire world. Geopolitical competition in the region threatens stability not just in Asia, but globally.  In a series of essays, Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) Auslin examines the key issues that are changing the balance of power in Indo-China and globally. He examines China's aggressive global policies and strategies, and its attempts to bend the world to its wishes.  He argues that the global focus on the Sino-US competition for power has obscured "Asia's other great game" - the rivalry between long-time foes, China and Japan. He questions whether Kim-Jong-un can control his nuclear weaponry and the implications for safety if he cannot.  Auslin examines the plight of women in India and asks whether its "missing women" are potentially hampering any role that India might play on the global stage. Underlying these concerns, the book analyses U.S. strategy in region. If there is be a shift in the global balance of power, what role can and should the U.S. take in limiting China's hegemony?  The dramatic final chapter paints a bleak picture of a Sino-American Littoral war in the very near future. Is this the geopolitical trajectory in the Indo-Pacific? Michael R. Auslin offers a "future-history" of what soon could be.  Michael Auslin, PhD, is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region.   Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Completed shortly before Hamas carried out its barbaric October massacre, Cary Nelson's Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (Academic Studies Press, 2024) takes up issues that have consequently gained new urgency in the academy worldwide. It is the first book to ask what impact antisemitism has had on the fundamental principles the academy relies on for its identity—academic freedom, free speech rights, standards for hiring or firing faculty members and administrators, and the ethics of academic conduct and debate. Antisemitic hatred is spreading at a fever pitch. What steps can counter it? What damage to students is done when departments embrace anti-Zionism? Should faculty members face consequences for promoting antisemitism on social media? Should universities make a new push to adopt the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How can the novel be a way to understand the development of nation-state borders? An important work in the intersections of law, literature, history, and migration, Stephanie DeGooyer's Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) offers fascinating insight into understanding naturalization. Tracing the idea of naturalization as it can be understood as a legal fiction and through literary fiction, DeGooyer offers a compelling approach to understanding naturalization as a generative mechanism for national expansion. Through a careful and engaging analysis that spans from Mary Shelley to court proceedings, De Gooyer's Before Borders is a compelling read that will be of great interest for those interested in histories of migration, creative approaches to studying the state, and ways to approach law through and alongside literature. Stephanie DeGooyer is Assistant Professor and Frank Borden and Barbara Lasater Hanes Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. Her research focuses on the intersections between law and literature. Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How did the search for Nazi fugitives become a vehicle to oppose South American dictatorships? Daniel Stahl’s award-winning new book traces the story of three continents over the course of half a century in Hunt for Nazis: South America's Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Through a rich transnational history, Daniel traces the ebb and flow of political will alongside the cooperation between far flung governments and civil society groups. The result is unique insight into how post-war justice became a battleground for the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. Daniel Stahl is a research associate at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Hunt for Nazis was distinguished with the Opus Primum award from the Volkswagen Foundation. Stahl has also worked on the Independent Historian’s Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office and is currently researching a history of arms trade regulation in the 20th century. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Today I talked to S. Deborah Kang about her book The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The INS on the Line explores the history behind Immigration and Naturalization Service throughout the 20th Century, interrogating how this agency was critical to the creation and re-creation of immigration law during this time period. Kang shows that the INS did not just think of itself as a law enforcement agency, but through numerous legal innovations and interpretations, embraced an identity as a lawmaking body responsible for balancing the money competing interests in local, regional, and national geographies. S. Deborah Kang is an Associate Professor of history at California State University San Marcos. She is currently studing the relationship between law and society on both the United States’ southern and northern borders. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his dazzling new book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Spencer Dew treats his readers to a riveting and often counterintuitive account of the interaction of law, race, and citizenship in the discourses of the Moorish Science Temple and other movements inspired by Noble Drew Ali. How do theological visions of democracy serve as critiques of racism and exclusionary politics? In what ways does a notion of sovereignty as located in faith and outside history mobilize popular sovereignty to critique modern state sovereignty? What are the complicated mechanisms through which legal institutions, texts, and theaters are engaged and negotiated to make space for a notion of citizenship grounded in the entanglement of law, love, and social transformation? These are among the central questions that animate this sparkling study, situated at the intersection of legal studies, African American Religion, and American Islam. Lucidly composed, theoretically charged, and discursively playful, The Aliites is sure to transform the way we look at Noble Drew Ali and his profound and complex legacy. This book will also generate important and productive conversations in various undergraduate and graduate seminars on American Islam, American Religion, Political Studies, History, and Law. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and extending French sovereignty over Algeria, this system deprived Algerian Muslims of full citizenship rights while reinforcing French colonial authority. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a rigorous and provocative critical "history of the present" that illuminates the persistence of the "Muslim question" in contemporary France. In chapters focused on polygamy, repudiation, and child marriage, the book traces the ways that the French fantasies of the family, including the sexualization of Muslim women and a preoccupation with the sexual "excesses" of Muslim men, found expression in legislation that segregated the legal control of property from the regulation of bodies, beliefs, and personhood. A fascinating genealogy that understands colonial law and the problem of difference within a broader cultural field, the book is an impressive, compelling analysis with striking resonances for a Franco-Algerian present still shaped by the legacies of the colonial past. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? In Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso, 2022), Leslie Kern travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. First observed in 1950s London, and theorised by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in every city and most neighbourhoods. Beyond the Yoga studio, farmer’s market and tattoo parlour, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities. Kern proposes an intersectional way of looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not natural. That it cannot be understood in economic terms, or by class. That it is not a question of taste. That it can only be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. Rather, she argues, it is a continuation of the settler colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing, and broken communities. But if gentrification is not inevitable, what can we do to stop the tide? In response, Kern proposes a genuinely decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-gentrification. One that demands the right to the city for everyone and the return of land and reparations for those who have been displaced. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his new book The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Security (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Joshua Tallis uses the “broken windows” theory of policing to reexamine the littorals, developing a multidimensional view of the maritime threat environment. With a foundational case study of the Caribbean, Tallis explores the connections between the narcotics trade, trafficking, money laundering, and weak institutions. He finds that networks are leveraged for multiple streams of illicit activity, but enforcement efforts sometimes only focus on a single threat. Additionally, Tallis compares these findings in two comparative case studies in the Gulf of Guinea and the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. Hybrid threats emerge as a theme in these case studies, marked by the fusion of criminality and terrorism and conventional and unconventional tactics. Ultimately, Tallis recommends actors in the maritime environment evaluate threats in this multidimensional context and collaborate with communities to achieve overarching strategic objectives. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Dr. Robert J. Spitzer’s classic text, The Politics of Gun Control: 8th Edition (Routledge, 2020), has been revised based on new data on gun ownership and use. Dr. Spitzer insightfully interrogates the impact of gun politics on the 2018 elections, new research on the history of American gun laws, and controversies over the geography of guns -- where and when they can be carried and whether they can be concealed. The podcast conversation digs into new findings on elections, public opinion, single-issue voting, the parallel histories of gun rights/regulations, and the changing profiles and strategies of gun safety groups. Dr. Spitzer provides insights on the upcoming midterm elections, forecasts what is at stake in the upcoming Supreme Court case, NYS Gun & Pistol v. Bruen, and provides a reminder that federalism can never be far from any case analysis in American politics. Dr. Robert J. Spitzer is a Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Cortland. Trained by Theodore Lowi, Dr, Spitzer has published books on the presidency, the right to life mov, and the constitution -- with several works focused on the right to bear arms, gun control, and gun rights. The Supreme Court will hear its first Second Amendment case since 2010 and Robert’s article “Gun Law History in the United States and Second Amendment Rights” is cited by the Solicitor General of the US in his amicus brief. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law from its conception until the early years of the 1940s. The law, which began as a state effort to tamp down radicalism and “dangerous thought” (mostly Marxism) and preserve and protect imperial sovereignty, spawned a massive apparatus populated by both state and nonstate actors dedicated to ideologically converting and rehabilitating thought criminals. In addition to being a case study of the nature and ideology of punishment and repentance for thought crimes in late Imperial Japan—and the way in which the emperor functioned as a “ghost in the machine” animating the pursuit of political repression—Ward’s book also provides insight into the policing of ideological threats and its relationship to national identity politics. Thought Crime follows the evolution and transformation of the Peace Preservation Law and its attendant social and institutional structures from interwar attempts to repress dangerous thought to a system of mass ideological conversion, and finally to the consequences of its integration into practices of total mobilization during wartime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Custom was fundamental to mediaeval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the mediaeval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualised in writing. In Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Ada Maria Kuskowski uses French lawbooks known as coutumiers to trace the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten address the role of statistics and probability in the evaluation of forensic evidence, including both theoretical issues and applications in legal contexts. It discusses what evidence is and how it can be quantified, how it should be understood, and how it is applied (and, sometimes misapplied). Ronald Meester is Professor in probability theory at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is co-author of the books Continuum Percolation (1996), A Natural Introduction to Probability Theory (2003), Random Networks for Communication (2008), and has written around 120 research papers on topics including percolation theory, ergodic theory, philosophy of science, and forensic probability. Klaas Slooten works as Statistician at the Netherlands Forensic Institute and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he is Professor by special appointment. He as published around 30 articles on forensic probability and statistics. He is interested in the mathematical, legal, and philosophical evaluation of evidence. Marc Goulet is Professor in mathematics and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Over the past decade, Poland and Hungary have become laboratories for a new kind of government: proto-authoritarian regimes that still have regular elections, vibrant oppositions and are externally constrained by EU law and potential loss of fiscal transfers. Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister since 2010, especially has generated a comprehensive academic literature attempting to understand the special nature of his regime. Two earlier podcasts with András Körösényi and Gábor Scheiring about their efforts to classify Orbánism can be found in the NBN library and a conversation Lasse Skytt about his new edition of Orbanland (New Europe Books, 2021) is coming soon. In their new book - Illiberal Constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary: The Deterioration of Democracy, Misuse of Human Rights and Abuse of the Rule of Law (Routledge, 2021) - Professors Drinóczi and Bień-Kacała redefine the models of government practised by Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński. By examining Polish and Hungarian history, identity, and political and legal systems, as well as the influence of European rule of law, they alight on what they believe is a new political phenomenon: illiberal constitutionalism. Agnieszka Bień-Kacała (a Pole) teaches law at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and Tímea Drinóczi (a Hungarian) teaches law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. *The authors' own book recommendations are Poland's Constitutional Breakdown by Wojciech Sadurski (OUP Oxford, 2019) and Democratic Decline in Hungary Law and Society in an Illiberal Democracy by András László Pap (Routledge, 2017). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care. As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Corrections in Ink (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is an electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey-from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom-emerging with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced. An elite, competitive figure skater growing up, Keri Blakinger poured herself into the sport, even competing at nationals. But when her skating partnership ended abruptly, her world shattered. With all the intensity she saved for the ice, she dove into self-destruction.  Then, on a cold day during Keri's senior year, the police stopped her. Caught with a Tupperware container full of heroin, she was arrested and ushered into a holding cell, a county jail, and finally into state prison. There, in the cruel "upside down," Keri witnessed callous conditions and encountered women from all walks of life-women who would change Keri forever. Two years later, Keri walked out of prison sober and determined to make the most of the second chance she was given-an opportunity impacted by her privilege as a white woman. She scored a local reporting job and eventually moved to Texas, where she started covering nothing other than: prisons. Now, over her career as an award-winning journalist, she has dedicated herself to exposing the broken system as only an insider could.  Not just a story about getting out and getting off drugs, this rich memoir is about finding redemption within yourself, as well as from the outside world, and the power of second chances.  Keri Blakinger is a staff reporter for The Marshall Project, an online news source about the criminal justice system. Her Twitter handle is @keribla. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefits? And, what are the impacts? In his new book, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020), Jathan Sadowski explores this question and those related in an investigation of the expansion of “smart” technologies – networked devices enabling automated data collection and use. In exploring the interests inherent in the design and deployment of smart technology, Sadowski, a Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Law at Monash University, investigates the political economy of digital capitalism, and the implications of continued reliance on and permeation of smart technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 202) Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating between content – by the Federal Communications Commission, a need to holistically understand the net neutrality debates still exists. How can we make sense of the intensification of controversy, the advocacy and protests, and the political and corporate wrangling? In his new book, The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities (MIT Press, 2019), Russell A. Newman, an assistant professor at Emerson College, sets out to provide an explication of the debates surrounding network neutrality. To do this, Newman critically examines the narratives put forth that erase elements foundational for interpreting the trajectory of open internet regulation, as well as comprehending the systems and impacts of internet advocacy, and the disparate rhetorics involved in this cause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return." In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group―unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts―has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region. In The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (All Point Books, 2020), Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf―both liberal Israelis supportive of a two-state solution―reveal the origins of the idea of a right of return, and explain how UNRWA – an agency created for the Palestinians and not for the millions of other refugees - the very agency charged with finding a solution for the refugees – colluded with Palestinian, Arab and international political pressure to create a permanent “refugee” problem. Schwartz and Wilf make a compelling and well-documented argument that this Palestinian demand for a “right of return” has no legal, moral or historical basis and make an impassioned plea for the US, the UN, and the EU to recognize this fact, for the good of Israelis and Palestinians alike. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel ttps://newbooksnetwork.com/category/van-leer-institute/   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Thomas Kuehn, Professor Emeritus at Clemson University talks about his new book, Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and share's the knowledge produced in a long and fruitful career. Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. In the Renaissance, jurists, humanists, and moralists began to theorize on the relations between people and property that formed the 'substance' of the family and what held it together over the years. Family property was a bundle of shared rights. This was most evident when brothers shared a household and enterprise, but it also faced overlapping claims from children and wives which the paterfamilias had to recognize. Thomas Kuehn explores patrimony in legal thought, and how property was inherited, managed and shared in Renaissance Italy. Managing a patrimony was not a simple task. This led to a complex and active conceptualization of shared rights, and a conscious application of devices in the law that could override liabilities and preserve the group, or carve out distinct shares for each member. This wide-ranging volume charts the ever-present conflicts that arose and were a constant feature of family life. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What is the connection between the movement for death penalty abolition and the anti-slavery movement? In Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition (Routledge, 2018), Bharat Malkani, Senior Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University, explores this question. Beginning with an acknowledgment that the death penalty in the United States of America has long been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, Malkani considers the relationships between the two abolitionist movements. He explains how historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. Using the history of slavery and abolition, Malkani argues that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists, offering lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Antonia Layard is a professor in Law at the University of Bristol Law School Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americans, it took far less time for courts to recognize marriage and adoption rights or workplace discrimination protections for queer people. The legal and political success of LGBTQ+ advocates often depended upon presenting sexual and gender identities as innate – or “immutable” to fit legal categories. Conservatives who oppose LGBTQ+ equality often argue that sexual and gender identity is something that can be taught. They use the offensive language of “grooming” and contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children. In Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Joanna Wuest unpacks how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality– based on arguments from the “natural sciences and mental health professions” – became central to American LGBTQ+ advocacy. Her book is both a “celebratory and cautionary” story about the costs of relying on science to win impressive victories for queer rights. The book interrogates the “LGBTQ+ rights movement, the scientific study of human difference, and the biopolitical character of citizenship that formed at the nexus of the two.” As LGBTQ+ advocates brought “science to bear on civil rights struggles,” they transformed American politics and the epistemology of identity politics more broadly.”  Dr. Joanna Wuest is an incoming Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a sociolegal scholar specializing in sexual and gender minority rights, health, and political economy. Her book, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Social Studies of Science's 2024 Rachel Carson Prize and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab. During the podcast, we mentioned: Joanna’s article with Dr. Briana S. Last, “Agents of scientific uncertainty: Conflicts over evidence and expertise in gender-affirming care bans for minors” in Social Science & Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The 1980s and '90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights. In Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy. Kelly Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and member of the Red De Politólogas – #NoSinMujeres. Her research and teaching examine state policy and rhetoric about Indigenous rights, irregular migration, and human security regimes in South America. She also researches pedagogy and knowledge production in political science classrooms, and migration politics and rhetoric in Nebraska. Her work has been externally funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship, and APSA Centennial Center. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Disability, Care and Family Law (Routledge 2021) examines the issues at the intersection of disability, care and family law. Professors Beverley Clough and Jonathan Herring challenge dominant narratives in family law, which disadvantage people with disabilities. The book enables the questioning of structural norms in policy and society which situates disability as private familial concern. It calls to the forefront marginalised voices to unveil complexities in seemingly neutral laws when applied to people with disabilities. The book engages with highly topical issues - for example, mothering a child who is in prison and is disabled, children who care for their disabled parents, deprivations of liberty of children with disabilities, and more. By bringing these complex issues together, the book moves beyond the dyad between care and disability relations in the context of family law. This is an important book for disability lawyers, family lawyers and scholars of vulnerability, care theory and relational theory. It will have significant implications for policy makers and practitioners.  Professor Beverley Clough is a Professor of Law and Social Justice at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also the author of The Spaces of Mental Capacity Law: Moving Beyond Binaries. Professor Jonathan Herring is the DM Wolfe-Clarendon Fellow in Law, Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is the author of several monographs, including The Right To Be Protected From Committing Suicide.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working life, and a kind of moral complicity." – Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict. There are many more examples of professional solidarity, however fragmented and tentative, sharing the link of a common ethic that helps make systems, and the analysis of them, possible in the larger political economy. Writing from a law professor’s vantage point, Katharina Pistor, in her new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019) explains how even though law is a social good it has been harnessed as a private commodity over time that creates private wealth, and plays a significant role in the increasing disparity of financial outcomes. As she points out in this interview, and her chapter ‘Masters of the Code’, it is ‘critical to have lawyers in the room’, and they clearly have the lead role in her well-researched and nuanced thesis centered on the decentralized institution of private law. Professor Pistor builds on Rudden’s ‘feudal calculus’ providing the long view of legal systems in maintaining and creating wealth and draws on historical analogies including the enclosure movements as she interweaves her analysis of capital asset creation with a broader critique of professional and institutional agency. Polanyi and Piketty figure into Pistor’s analysis among many others, as does the help of the state’s coercive backing as she draws on the breadth of her own governance research and analysis of the collapsed socialist regimes in the 1990s, and a research pivot toward western market economies following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Professor Pistor is a comparative scholar with a keen interdisciplinary eye for the relationship between law, values, and markets, dovetailing larger concepts with detailed descriptions of the coding of ‘stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations—assets that exist only in law.’ All of which informs her inquiry into why some legal systems have been more accommodating to capital’s coding cravings and others less so, as she describes the process by which capital is created. She moves beyond legal realism’s less granular critiques, and as reviewers such as Samuel Moyn have suggested – this book ‘deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy’. Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, and the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing so? How did the law, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded to such murders? In which instances did the monarch decide to forgive or show leniency, and when did justice opt for harsher punishment? In answering these questions, Uribe-Urán challenges some traditional notions of how honor is supposed to work in Iberian societies. Also, he contributes to a growing scholarship that demonstrates that far from being secluded in their homes, women in colonial Spanish America had active public lives. This book is a fascinating read for those interested in Atlantic history, and also, for those who want to understand the long history of domestic and gender violence. As Uribe-Urán tells us by the end, domestic violence is the most widespread human right’s violations today; histories of this phenomenon, widespread and pervasive, are necessary for our contemporary quest for truly making domestic violence the serious crime that it really is. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (NYU Press, 2022), Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Judah Schept is Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this episode of New Books in Law Siobhan talks with Candy Gunther Brown about her book Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (UNC Press, 2019). Dr. Brown is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a historian and ethnographer of religion and culture. Yoga and mindfulness activities, with roots in Asian traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have been brought into growing numbers of public schools since the 1970s. While they are commonly assumed to be secular educational tools, Candy Gunther Brown asks whether religion is truly left out of the equation in the context of public-school curricula. An expert witness in four legal challenges, Brown scrutinized unpublished trial records, informant interviews, and legal precedents, as well as insider documents, some revealing promoters of “Vedic victory” or “stealth Buddhism” for public-school children. The legal challenges are fruitful cases for Brown’s analysis of the concepts of religious and secular. While notions of what makes something religious or secular are crucial to those who study religion, they have special significance in the realm of public and legal norms. They affect how people experience their lives, raise their children, and navigate educational systems. The question of religion in public education, Brown shows, is no longer a matter of jurisprudence focused largely on the establishment of a Protestant Bible or nonsectarian prayer. Instead, it now reflects an increasingly diverse American religious landscape. Reconceptualizing secularization as transparency and religious voluntarism, Brown argues for an opt-in model for public-school programs. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this episode, Jorge Goldstein, the author of Patenting Life, delves into the critical junction where biotechnology meets patent law. With a background as a molecular biologist turned patent attorney, Goldstein offers unique insights into how commercial biology has evolved and its profound effects on patent regulations. The discussion takes listeners on a journey from the early days of recombinant DNA technology to the cutting-edge advancements of CRISPR. Goldstein articulates how the commercialization of biological research influences scientific inquiry and reshapes patent law, highlighting key legal cases that have set the boundaries for patenting living organisms while addressing the complex ethical considerations that accompany these developments. A significant theme in the conversation is the ongoing tension between academic research and commercial interests. Goldstein explains how this dynamic has molded patent policies and research agendas, emphasizing the concept of “enabling life” through patents. He also touches on emerging challenges posed by technologies like AI in biotechnology, raising questions about ownership and consent regarding biological materials and genetic data. Reflecting on broader ethical implications, Goldstein discusses the responsibilities that come with innovation in biotechnology and patent law while considering the future challenges for intellectual property frameworks, particularly in light of advancements in CRISPR and synthetic biology. This episode provides a comprehensive overview of how the patenting of life has transformed not only biology and medicine but also the legal landscape, prompting listeners to think critically about the implications of these changes for society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. ​Property and Power seeks to explore this issue within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé uses cutting-edge research design and extensive field research to make connections among political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government catalyze access to fundamental economic rights: property rights. Women in politics also have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, sparking integrative solutions to intra-household bargaining. Although they can lead to backlash, quotas are essential for enforcement ​of rights. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower. Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India has been awarded the APSA’s 2021 Luebbert Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Politics. Dr. Rachel Brule is Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Graduate Faculty with BU’s Department of Political Science, a Core Faculty at the Global Development Policy Center, and affiliated faculty with the Institute for Economic Development.  Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

I spoke with Prof. Christopher Marquis, Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Global Sustainable Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University. His latest research book tells the story of an ambitious certification programme that aims to signal to customers and shareholders those small and large corporations that are responsible and caring with their workers, customers, with the planet and the local communities where they operate. Businesses have a big role to play in a capitalist society. They can tip the scales toward the benefit of the few, with toxic side effects for all, or they can guide us toward better, more equitable long-term solutions. In Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism (Yale UP, 2020), Marquis tells the story of the rise of a new corporate form—the B Corporation. Founded by a group of friends who met at Stanford, these companies undergo a rigorous certification process, overseen by the B Lab, and commit to putting social benefits, the rights of workers, community impact, and environmental stewardship on equal footing with financial shareholders. In our conversation Christopher mentioned the origin of the book and why he believes in the work done by B Lab. The book is divided into 11 chapter and is full of interesting practical examples. In the talk we also mentioned the notion of ‘benefit corporation’, in the US and elsewhere. I have asked the author why we should trust the founders of the B Movement and their certification programme. He answered with some examples and convincing arguments. We then focused on chapter 1, ‘Interdependencies not Externalities’, chapter 6, ‘Employees as the Heart of the Company’, chapter 10, ‘Big Isn’t Always Bad’, and eventually chapter 11, ‘Convincing Consumers to Care’. We concluded with his plans for the next book. Informed by over a decade of research and animated by interviews with the movement’s founders and leading figures, Marquis’s book explores the rapid growth of companies choosing to certify as B Corps, both in the United States and internationally, and explains why the future of B Corporations is vital for us all. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Dennis Rasmussen’s new book, The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter (UP of Kansas, 2023), is a propulsive analysis of one of the key members of the Founding generation, Gouverneur Morris of New York and Pennsylvania. Morris is quite a character—from his reputation as a lady’s man to his brilliant speeches at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Rasmussen has pulled together archival research on Morris along with historical and political context to understand the Constitution’s penman, since Morris was responsible for writing the draft of the document that would become the U.S. Constitution. Gouverneur Morris was a fascinating fellow—and his exploits were well known among his peers and colleagues. Morris, who had been educated at King’s College (now Columbia), and had become a lawyer, made much of his fortune in land speculation. He was active during the Revolutionary War, especially in helping to manage payment and supplies to the troops fighting for the new country. Morris, like Jefferson and Adams, also represented the United States abroad, particularly in France during the revolutionary period there. His capacity to negotiate through the factions during the French Revolution was vital to the United States since he was able to protect both American citizens and U.S. interests in France. Morris’s diplomatic and political expertise was in sharp relief during this period in France. As a Federalist Morris also served in the U.S. Senate, elected in 1800 as the Jeffersonians were coming into office. He was at Alexander Hamilton’s deathbed with him after Hamilton’s duel with Burr. But the central action of The Constitution’s Penman is during the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Rasmussen lays out all of the ways that Morris had a hand in the creation of the American constitutional system, even though he was absent from the convention in the early going in June. The bulk of The Constitution’s Penman focuses on each section of the governing structure of the U.S. national system and draws out Morris’ role in shaping these parts of the American system. While some of Morris’ ideas were more extreme than others—including his thinking on the form that the U.S. Senate should take—his ideas and influence are clear throughout the document itself. Rasmussen digs into Morris’ speeches on the floor of the convention, his role in writing up the document—in which he pulled 23 articles into the seven articles that compose the United States Constitution—and his authorship of the Preamble itself. Rasmussen also focuses on Morris’ strident denunciation of slavery at the Convention and elsewhere, becoming, on some level, the Framers’ conscience on the issue of slavery. Dennis Rasmussen has written a book where the story truly dances off the page—and while Gouverneur Morris himself provides much of the content because of his cosmopolitan approach to life, his sharp wit and intelligence, and his interesting lifestyle—this is quite a compelling read. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel (Oxford University Press) traces the origins of the idea, its development, and its crucial importance in Israel's past and present. The book also shows how the history of this idea engages with burning contemporary debates on questions of global human rights, the role of religion in Middle East conflicts, and the long-term consequences of European imperialism. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy is an intellectual history, based on newly discovered material from numerous Israeli archives, private correspondence, court records, and lesser-known published works. It explains why the idea of the halakhic state emerged when it did, what happened after it initially failed to take hold, and how it has regained popularity in recent decades, provoking cultural conflict that has severely shaken Israeli society. The book's historical analysis gives rise to two wide-reaching insights. First, it argues that religious politics in Israel can be understood only within the context of the largely secular history of European nationalism and not, as is commonly argued, as an anomalous exception to it. It shows how even religious Jews most opposed to modern political thought nevertheless absorbed the fundamental assumptions of modern European political thought and reread their own religious traditions onto that model. Second, it demonstrates that religious-secular tensions are built into the intellectual foundations of Israel rather than being the outcome of major events like the 1967 War. These insights have significant ramifications for the understanding of the modern state. In particular, the account of the blurring of the categories of "secular" and "religious" illustrated in the book are relevant to all studies of modern history and to scholars of the intersection of religion and human rights. Alexander Kaye, Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair of Israel Studies; Assistant Professor, Department of Near East and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/van-leer-institute/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this episode of High Theory, Erin McElroy talks with Nathan Kim about Property Technology. This is the first episode in the High Theory in STEM series, that tackles topics in science, technology, engineering, and medicine from a highly theoretical perspective. Not only is “property technology” a term for digital tools and other methods used by landlords to track and dispossess tenants, but property itself is a technology. In the episode, Nathan references Erin’s article “Property as Technology,” in which they write that "property itself has long served as a technology of racial dispossession, constituting a palimpsest for the contemporary gentrifying moment." You can read the whole article here: McElroy, Erin. "Property as technology: temporal entanglements of race, space, and displacement." City 24, no. 1-2 (2020): 112-129. Erin McElroy is an assistant professor in American Studies at UT Austin, a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and an editor of the Radical Housing Journal. They are fighting the good fight. We hope you do too. This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu for this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In The Pirate's Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Simon presents a rollicking account of pirates’ codes, the strict rules essential for survival at sea. Pirates have long captured the imagination with images of cutlass-wielding swashbucklers, eye patches and buried treasure. But what was life really like on a pirate ship? Piracy was a risky, sometimes deadly occupation, and strict orders were essential for everyone’s survival. These ‘Laws’ were sets of rules that determined everything from how much each pirate earned from their plunder to compensation for injuries, punishments and even the entertainment allowed on ships. These rules became known as the ‘Pirates’ Code’, which all pirates had to publicly swear by. Using primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, trial proceedings and maritime logs, this book explains how these codes were the key to pirates’ success in battle, both on sea and on land. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or today’s immigration and border control, this volume invites its readers to consider whether individual rights were in fact, or at least in theory, available to the marginalized. By focusing not only on the economically impoverished but also those who were disenfranchised because of disability, gender, race, religion or infidelity, this book also sheds light on the relationship between the early history of individual rights and social justice at the margins. Jonathan Robinson, Ph.D. (2010) in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He currently acts as a lawyer and is the author of William of Ockham’s Theory of Property Rights in Context (Brill, 2012). Virpi Mäkinen is Senior Lecturer in Theological and Social Ethics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Pamela Slotte is Associate Professor of Minority Studies at the Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Heikki Haara is Senior Lecturer of Political History at the University of Helsinki. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History at Yale University, about neoliberalism, human rights and what our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our true values. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Over the past decade, many of the world’s biggest companies have found themselves embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, tax evasion, or sanction violations. Corporations including Volkswagen, BP, and Credit Suisse have paid record-breaking fines. Many critics of globalisation and corporate impunity cheer this turn toward accountability. Others, however, question American dominance in legal battles that seem to impose domestic legal norms beyond national boundaries.  In Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Cornelia Woll examines the politics of American corporate criminal law’s extraterritorial reach. As governments abroad seek to respond to US law enforcement actions against their companies, they turn to flexible legal instruments that allow prosecutors to settle a case rather than bring it to court. With her analysis of the international and domestic politics of law enforcement targeting big business, Woll traces the rise of what she calls “negotiated corporate justice” in global markets. Woll charts the path to this shift through case studies of geopolitical tensions and accusations of “economic lawfare,” pitting the United States against the European Union, China, and Japan. She then examines the reactions to the new legal landscape, describing institutional changes in the common law countries of the United Kingdom and Canada and the civil law countries of France, Brazil, and Germany. Through an insightful interdisciplinary analysis of how the prosecution of corporate crime has evolved in the twenty-first century, Dr. Woll demonstrates the profound transformation of the relationship between states and private actors in world markets, showing that law is part of economic statecraft in the connected global economy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Many people think prisons are all the same-rows of cells filled with violent men who officials rule with an iron fist. Yet, life behind bars varies in incredible ways. In some facilities, prison officials govern with care and attention to prisoners' needs. In others, officials have remarkably little influence on the everyday life of prisoners, sometimes not even providing necessities like food and clean water. Why does prison social order around the world look so remarkably different?  In The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World (Oxford UP, 2020), David Skarbek develops a theory of why prisons and prison life vary so much. He finds that how they're governed-sometimes by the state, and sometimes by the prisoners-matters the most. He investigates life in a wide array of prisons-in Brazil, Bolivia, Norway, a prisoner of war camp, England and Wales, women's prisons in California, and a gay and transgender housing unit in the Los Angeles County Jail-to understand the hierarchy of life on the inside. Drawing on economics and a vast empirical literature on legal systems, Skarbek offers a framework to not only understand why life on the inside varies in such fascinating and novel ways, but also how social order evolves and takes root behind bars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Most people recognize that the internet is growing at an exponential rate. But few have thought as deeply as Laura DeNardis, a Professor and Interim Dean at the School of Communication at American University, about what those changes will mean for privacy, security, human rights, and democracy. In The Internet in Everything: Privacy and Security in a World With No Off Switch (Yale, 2020), Professor DeNardis shows that the policy tools and normative constructs we have built around the internet are outdated. The internet has evolved from a system of communication to one of control—and that demands a new approach to internet governance. On this episode, I talked with Dr. DeNardis about why we need to move beyond an understanding of internet governance as content governance; whether governments can resist exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities; and why she thinks ‘internet freedom’ is a “somewhat fetishized ideal.” At one point, Dr. DeNardis’s dog weighs in on the virtues of techno-libertarianism. We wrap up with some predictions for the future of the multi-stakeholder governance model and Dr. DeNardis’s thoughts on 2020.  John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Postscript invites scholars to react to contemporary political events and today’s podcast welcomes an expert on domestic violence and firearms law to analyze a controversial Second Amendment case that the United States Supreme Court will hear this Fall, United States v. Rahimi. Kelly Roskam, JD is the Director of Law and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. She studies the constitutional implications of, advocates for, and works to improve the implementation of firearms laws. She has been writing about the practical implications of the Rahimi case since it came up through the 5th circuit (for example, “The Fifth Circuit’s Rahimi decision protects abusers’ access to guns. The Supreme Court must act to protect survivors of domestic violence” and “A Texas Judge Is Using Originalism to Justify Arming Domestic Abusers” (co-authored with Spencer Cantrell and Natalie Nanasi). In the podcast, we discuss the specifics of this strange case (a man who assaulted a woman, shot in the air, and later threatened to kill her claims that his constitutional rights have been violated – and the 5th circuit agrees that Congress is the threat to liberty). Ms. Roskam explains how the legal regime Congress created in 1994 to protect survivors of intimate violence also protects the safety of the public at large. She presents some of the data (e.g., that the presence of a firearm increases the likelihood that domestic violence will escalate into a homicide). She explains what is at stake, the possible ways the Supreme Court might approach the case, and ways to combat firearm violence beyond the courts. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity (U of Minnesota Press, 2023), J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible. J. Logan Smilges (they/them) is assistant professor of English language and literatures at the University of British Columbia and author of Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (Minnesota, 2022). Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Myths about the powers held by the United States are often supported by the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which derives its logic from the interpretation of a document that the US itself developed. Therefore, when pressure is placed on a specific legal precedent, the shallowness of its validity is revealed. Dr. Mónica A. Jiménez accomplishes this kind of scholarly work in her recently published book Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). By tracing the legal logic of what continues to animate the colonial dynamics between the United States and Puerto Rico, Jiménez offers a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that both folds time and space to make clear how late-19th century Supreme Court logics and opinions continue to subjugate the land and people of Puerto Rico to colonial violence. Split into two sections, the first half of the book details the key case Downes v. Bidwell (1901), while the second half explores how the legal ramifications of Downes continued to haunt the archipelago. The first chapter focuses on the development of Downes and its outcome, which argued that territories of the United States were not allowed to access certain provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The ambiguous legal foundation for this decision was established in 1900 after Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States when the US Supreme Court established the territorial incorporation doctrine, effectively creating the legal category of “unincorporated territory." Chapter two probes the white supremacist U.S. legal landscape to offer a “genealogy of racial exclusion in law” (36) that shows the reader how U.S. settler colonialism and empire-making are dependent on the reuse and recycling of legal precedents and tactics that disenfranchised and dispossessed racially marginalized communities. By excavating the legal opinions handed down during the Marshal Trilolgy and Dred Scott v. Sandford – a collection of Supreme Court cases that defined 19th-century legal policy for Native Americans and African Americans, respectively – Jiménez makes clear that “It is not a coincidence that the most shameful cases in the United States’ legal history of race should serve as direct precedents to a decision that continues to serve as the basis for Puerto Rico’s exclusion more than one hundred years after it was handed down” (9). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: The field of reproductive health studies The data on contraceptive access and effectiveness [even when used correctly] Why we need to trust women What happens when a pregnant person seeking an abortion is turned away The long-term outcomes for people who have had abortions The consequences for people denied abortions A discussion of the book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion Today’s book is: The Turnaway Study, which asks what happens when a person seeking an abortion is turned away. Dr. Diane Greene Foster and a team of scientists, psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nurses, physicians, economists, sociologists, and public health researchers conducted a ten-year study on the outcomes of a thousand pregnant people across America, studying both those who received abortions, and those who were turned away. Dr. Foster analyzes impacts on mental and physical health, careers, and romantic relationships, offering the first data-driven examination of the negative consequences for pregnant people who are denied abortions. Our guest is: Dr. Diana Greene Foster, a professor and demographer who uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. She led the Turnaway Study in the US, and is collaborating with scientists on a Nepal Turnaway Study. Dr. Foster also worked on the evaluation of the California State family planning program, Family PACT, demonstrating the effectiveness of the program in reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy and the effect of dispensing a one-year supply of contraception. Dr. Foster created a new methodology for estimating pregnancies averted based on a Markov model and a microsimulation to identify the cost-effectiveness of advance provision of emergency contraception. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advocacy webpage  The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having or Being Denied an Abortion, by Diana Greene Foster Advancing New Studies in Reproductive Health You’re Doing it Wrong: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise by Bethany L. Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan A discussion of the book You’re Doing it Wrong,  You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Based on ethnographic research with victims of intimate partner violence since 2014, Tiantian Zheng's Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China (Bloomsbury, 2022) brings to the forefront women's experiences of, negotiations about, and contestations against violence, and men's narratives about the reasons for their violence. Using an innovative methodology - online chat groups, it foregrounds the role of history, structural inequalities, and the cultural system of power hierarchy in situating and constructing intimate partner violence. Centering on men and women's narratives about violence, this book connects intimate partner violence with invisible structural violence - the historical, cultural, political, economic, and legal context that gives rise to and perpetuates violence against women. Through examining the ways in which women's lives are constrained by various forms of violence, hierarchy, and inequality, this book shows that violence against women is a structural issue that is historically produced and politically and culturally engaged. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Rohit De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018) considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship. Rohit De is assistant professor of history at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

When miners arrived in California seeking their fortune during the gold rush of the 1840s and early 1850s, they encountered a place with few existing legal systems. Recently acquired from Mexico, California was truly America's frontier, and when American miners arrived they did what Americans have always done: they held meetings.  In We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush (Harvard UP, 2022), Seton Hall law professor Andrea McDowell explains the development and working of miners codes and other legal systems put in place during the heady and often violent early days of the California Gold Rush. Before statehood, miners were on their own to construct a version of direct democracy that reflected their values and gave them power to govern, until the creation of state government and the arrival of corporate mining entities. In McDowell's telling, the early days of the gold rush speak to Americans strong belief in democracy and self-governance, and who gets a say in justice when gold is on the line. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debate. James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Michele F. Margolis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has recently published a book titled From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention. Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity (U Toronto Press, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of the Barbie trial, including the investigation leading up to it, the legal background to the case, and the hurdles the prosecution had to clear in order to bring Barbie to justice. Richard J. Golsan examines the strategies used by the defence, the prosecution, and the lawyers who represented Barbie's many victims at the trial. The book draws from press coverage, articles, and books about Barbie and the trial published at the time, as well as recently released archival sources and the personal archives of lawyers at the trial. Making the case that, despite the views of its many critics, the Barbie trial was a success in legal, historical, and pedagogical terms, Justice in Lyon details how the trial has had a positive impact on French and international law governing crimes against humanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In early 2019, freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposed a bold new piece of legislation, now very well known as the Green New Deal. Intended as a means of combating climate change, it stunned a number of people due to its enormous ambition, including massive overhauls of our energy systems, as well as providing housing and healthcare for everyone. Naturally a piece of legislation this large raised a number of questions, which is what my guests today are here to discuss. I recently had the pleasure of talking with Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos, the authors of ​A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal​ (Verso, 2019). The book is short and accessible, written for everyone interested in understanding this vital piece of legislation, so if you are like me and you don’t understand the fine details of climate economics, you can still pick this up and gain a sense of what is to be done. The book also features a short forward by Naomi Klein, who has been tracking the relationship between economic and climate politics for some time. Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a Contributing Writer at the ​Intercept​. She is the co-editor of ​We Own the Future​ and author of ​The New Denialism​. Her writing has appeared in the ​Guardian​, ​Rolling Stone​, ​Harper’s​, ​In These Times​, and ​Dissent​ Alyssa Battistoni (@alybatt) is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and an editor at Jacobin.​ Her writing has appeared the ​Guardian,​ ​n+1​, ​The Nation​, ​Jacobin,​ ​In These Times​, Dissent​, and the ​Chronicle of Higher Education.​ Daniel Aldana Cohen (@aldatweets) is an assistant professor of sociolgy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. His writing has appeared in the ​Guardian​, ​Nature,​ ​The Nation​, ​Jacobin​, ​Public Books​, ​Dissent​, and ​NACLA.​ Thea Riofrancos (@triofrancos) is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, and is the author of ​Resource Radicals.​ Her writing has appeared in the ​Guardian​, ​n+1​, Jacobin,​ the ​Los Angeles Review of Books​, ​Dissent,​ and ​In These Times​. She serves on the steering committee of DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name the "Civil War." In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics. In The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty at California community colleges as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019)  It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case.  The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts.  We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision.  The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States.  It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How has “cybersecurity” become a catch-all for everything that touches our digital world? In his new book, The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East (Hurst, 2021), Dr. James Shires shows how myriad actors have exploited the prominent yet esoteric nature of the field, appropriating its symbolic power to serve their own interests. In the process, cybersecurity has grown to incorporate a series of seemingly distinct practices. An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at the University of Leiden, Dr. Shires explores four discursive spaces where the language of cybersecurity permeates: cybersecurity as interstate digital conflict, cybersecurity as the protection of human rights, cybersecurity as domestic information control, and cybersecurity as the prevention of foreign interference. Through a close examination of each of these spaces within the Middle East, Dr. Shires deconstructs how various actors disguised value-laden arguments as technological imperatives—and how they reacted when they met resistance from skeptics. He concludes that politics, as much as the essentials of technology, often determines the scope and nature of cybersecurity. John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Valentina Capurri's book Not Good Enough for Canada: Canadian Public Discourse Around Issues of Inadmissibility for Potential Immigrants with Diseases And/Or Disabilities (U Toronto Press, 2020) investigates the development of Canadian immigration policy with respect to persons with a disease or disability throughout the twentieth century. With an emphasis on social history, this book examines the way the state operates through legislation to achieve its goals of self-preservation even when such legislation contradicts state commitments to equality rights. Looking at the ways federal politicians, mainstream media, and the judicial system have perceived persons with disabilities, specifically immigrant applicants with disabilities, this book reveals how Canadian immigration policy has systematically omitted any reference to this group, rendering them socially invisible. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Robert Nichols, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Minnesota, has written an engaging and important examination of the clash between the western theoretical approaches to the idea of property and possession and the understanding of land property and possession held by indigenous peoples in a variety of societies settled by Anglophone colonizers. Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke University Press, 2019) pulls together or bridges intellectual traditions, bringing indigenous political thought into conversation with critical theory and Anglo social contract theory, centering on the different understandings of property, ownership, and possession. Nichols weaves together a variety of different ways of thinking about the questions of property and possession, examining the language that is applied to the concept of property and how this also defines our understanding of possession and dispossession as well as the dichotomous ideas of property and theft. He also traces the early modern concepts of property and contract and the contemporary legal arguments that have been made to claim land and property from indigenous peoples. Folded into these discussions is a richly delineated argument that lays out the tension inherent in the idea of property, and how this idea was transformed within the context of the European intellectual tradition, and how critical theory subsequently problematized property and possession. Theft is Property! explores the idea of recursive dispossession, which Nichols explains as the situation where “new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation.” The exploration of this concept—through critical race theory, Marxism, and feminist theory—takes the reader on a journey focusing on the longstanding claims made by indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and the counteractions and arguments made by Anglo-settler societies, which have generally left indigenous communities essentially dispossessed of both land and rights. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides.  In Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin, and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

R. H. Helmholz's book Natural Law in Court (Harvard UP, 2015) serves as a guide to the uses of natural law in the past. It shows how lawyers, judges and jurists used natural law to reason and argue about all areas of the law, be they procedural or substantive. Far from being a polemic, this book delves into the legal record of multiple countries to compare, contrast and shed light on the role natural law played in actual legal disputes. Due to the renewed interest in natural law today, this book serves as an important counter-point to legal thinkers who too often rely on purely philosophical or theoretical notions of natural law in their arguments to show how natural law was (and potential can be) deployed to make effective legal arguments in actual legal proceedings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thompson, in exploring the census, contextualizes her analysis within three case studies: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She examines these cases over the course of more than 200 years of history and data, and she traces the shifts and changes in terms of racial categorization on the census, noting the fluid nature of understandings of race as applied to the citizen body in each of these countries, and how race was made legible by the census. The Schematic State also digs into the state, how it makes use of the data that is gleaned from the census, and what these uses suggest in terms of the instrument of the census. This book will be of interest to a variety of scholars and lay people, since the text and the research knit together different fields within and beyond political science, including comparative politics, critical race studies, critical legal studies, political theory, public policy, institutional political development, and statistical studies. *Winner, 2017 Race and Comparative Politics Best Book Award, Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section, American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States (Cornell UP, 2021), David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution--a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-scale bargaining method coupled with powerful incentives for union membership. These changes would represent a remarkable shift from the norm, but would be based on lessons from other countries, US history and current policy in several cities and states. In outlining the shift, Madland details how these proposals might mend the broken economic and political systems in the United States. He also uses three examples from Britain, Canada, and Australia to explore what there is yet to learn about this new system in other developed nations. Madland's practical advice in Re-Union extends to a proposal for how to implement the changes necessary to shift the current paradigm. This powerful call to action speaks directly to the workers affected by these policies--the very people seeking to have their voices recognized in a system that attempts to silence them. David Madland is Senior Fellow and Strategic Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress. He is author of Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn’t work without a strong middle class. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In the late nineteenth century, Italians and Eastern European Jews joined millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations, including the United States. Many Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded these newcomers as biologically and culturally inferior--unassimilable--and by 1924, the United States had instituted national origins quotas to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In her new book Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (UNC Press, 2020), Maddalena Marinari examines how, from 1882 to 1965, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country’s immigration policy as they mobilized against the immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. Strategic alliances among restrictionist legislators in Congress, a climate of anti-immigrant hysteria, and a fickle executive branch often left these immigrants with few options except to negotiate and accept political compromises. As they tested the limits of citizenship and citizen activism, however, the actors at the heart of Marinari’s story shaped the terms of debate around immigration in the United States in ways we still reckon with today. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Maddalena Marinari is Assistant Professor in History; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; and Peace Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College. She has published extensively on immigration restriction and immigrant mobilization. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Until 1900, most political parties in the United States chose their leaders – either in back rooms with a few party elites making decisions or in conventions. The direct primary, in which voters select party nominees for state and federal offices, was one of the most widely adopted political reforms of the early twentieth century Progressive movement. Intuitively, the direct primary sounds democratic. Voters directly select the candidates. They have more of say over who will ultimately represent or govern them. But decades of scholarship suggests that direct primaries might not have changed the outcomes of party nominations. The conventional wisdom is that as the strength of the Progressive movement declined and voters paid attention to other issues. Party leaders were able to reassert control over candidate selection. In Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr. Robert G. Boatright insists this narrative is incorrect and misleading for contemporary efforts to reform the primary election system in the U.S. because some of the early concerns about primaries are still with us today. The book presents data from 1928-1970 explaining the type of reforms states implemented and their success or failure. Dr. Boatright argues that the introduction of the indirect primary created more chaos than scholars have previously documented. Political parties, factions, and reform groups manipulated primary election laws to gain advantage, often under the guise of enhancing democracy. How does this history impact contemporary plans for reform of the primary system? Many suggested reforms were tried – and failed – during the 20th century. Boatright concludes that despite the clear flaws in the direct primary system, little can be done to change the primary system. Reformers should instead focus on elections and governance. The end of the podcast features his suggestions. During the podcast, Rob mentions Dr. Jack Santucci’s More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America (Oxford 2022). Dr. Robert G. Boatright is Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, MA and the Director of Research for the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the effects of campaign and election laws on the behavior of politicians and interest groups with a particular emphasis on primary elections and campaign finance laws. He is the author or editor of 9 books. Heath Brown and I have interviewed Rob previously on New Books in Political Science: Trumping Politics as Usual:Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (with co-author Valerie Sperling) and The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

As British colonial rulers expanded their control in South Asia legal resolutions were increasingly shaped by the English classification of social life. The definitional divide that structured the role of law in most cases was the line between what was deemed religious versus secular. In Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Julia Stephens, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, examines how Islam and Muslims were regulated within legal domains that managed various spheres of life. British rule determined that religious laws were most effective in governing family affairs but secular laws would govern markets and transactions. What complicated this simple binary was that Islamic “personal law” was very often bound up with economic issues. In our conversation we discuss British notions of “secular governance,” marriage and women’s property, the role of custom in legal reasoning, rulings around ritual and challenges to conformity, the construction of “personal law,” the relationships between colonial judges and Muslim legal scholars, how colonial law contributed to women’s economic marginalization, the relationship between gender and Islamic law, tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and how South Asia’s past can help us think about the present. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

When Americans talk about guns, they often use terms like “gun rights” or “gun control.” They also tend to separate gun politics and the politics of the police. In Policing and the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race (Princeton University Press, 2021), Jennifer Carlson identifies the inaccuracies of both. She provides two alternative narratives of American “gun talk” -- gun militarism and gun populism -- that clarify the stakes in today’s gun debates.. Based on her extensive research – using local and national newspapers, interviews with police chiefs, and observations made at gun licensing boards – she insists these two discourses reveal how race shapes both how gun politics unfold and how gun policies are created to differentiate between legitimate violence and criminal violence. Coercive social control is organized by racialized understandings of gun violence. Carlson demonstrates the roles that the NRA, police chiefs, and gun administrators play in distinguishing the boundaries of legitimate violence for both private and public gun owners. For her, linking the politics of guns with the politics of the police clarifies our political and policy debates -- as well as the complex terrain negotiated each day between police and private civilians in our social lives. Dr. Jennifer Carlson is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Government, & Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her remarkable earlier book, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford, 2015), has shaped the study of how guns impact American society in multiple fields. Her public facing scholarship includes commentary in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour On February 23, 2016, Shawna Lynn Jones stepped into the brush to fight a wildfire that had consumed ten acres of terrain on a steep ridge in Malibu. Jones carried fifty pounds of equipment and a chainsaw to help contain the blaze. As she fired up her saw, the earth gave way under her feet and a rock fell from above and struck her head, knocking her unconscious. A helicopter descended to airlift her out. As it took off, she was handcuffed to the gurney. She was neither a desperate Malibu resident nor a professional firefighter. She was a female inmate firefighter, briefly trained and equipped, and paid one dollar an hour to fight fires while working off her sentence. As California has endured unprecedented wildfires over the past decade, the state has come to rely heavily on its prison population, with imprisoned firefighters making up at least 40 percent of Cal Fire’s on-the-ground fire crews. Of those imprisoned workers, 250 are women.  In Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Line of California's Wildfires (MCD, 2021), Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine to follow Jones and her fellow female inmate firefighters before, during, and—if they’re lucky—after incarceration. Lowe takes us into their lives, into the prisons and the women’s decisions to join the controversial program, into the fire camps where they live and train, and onto the front lines, where their brave work is unquestionably heroic—if often thankless. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movies and pulp fiction, and prioritizing social rights over individual rights. These provisions enabled legislations to adopt two national censorship laws intended to regulate the movie industry and retail trade in pulp fiction. In her book, “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kara Ritzheimer explains how both laws had their ideological origins in grass-roots anti-'trash' campaigns inspired by early encounters with commercial mass culture and Germany's federalist structure. Before the war, activists characterized censorship as a form of youth protection. Afterwards, they described it as a form of social welfare. Local activists and authorities enforcing the decisions of federal censors made censorship familiar and respectable even as these laws became a lightning rod for criticism of the young republic. Nazi leaders subsequently refashioned anti-'trash' rhetoric to justify the stringent censorship regime they imposed on Germany. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his book, De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Cyril Ghosh interrogates three arenas of debate over LGBT+ rights in the contemporary American landscape—debates over and critiques of pinkwashing, the recent US Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and Kenji Yoshino’s concept of gay covering. Ghosh is associate professor of political science at Wagner College and was the original host of the New Books in Political Science podcast. In each case, Ghosh identifies a tension in the promotion of LGBT+ rights, from both liberal and radical perspectives, demonstrating that these discourses often (re/)produce their own assimilationist logics. Drawing on queer theoretical frameworks, Ghosh ultimately argues for an approach to theorizing rights that takes seriously the project of resisting and dismantling assimilationist demands. The podcast is co-hosted by Heath Brown and Emily Crandall. Heath Brown is associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown Emily K. Crandall holds a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Throughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of lynching, burning, or murdering of LGBTQ people have been documented for centuries. Prior to the 1970s, LGBTQ people were deemed as having psychological disorders and subsequently subject to electroshock therapy and other ineffective and cruel treatments. LGBTQ people have historically been arrested or imprisoned for crimes like sodomy, cross-dressing, and gathering in public spaces. And while there have been many strides to advocate for LGBTQ rights in contemporary times, there are still many ways that the criminal justice system works against LGBTQ and their lives, liberties, and freedoms. Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System (Lexington Books, 2020) examines the state of LGBTQ people within the criminal justice system. Intertwining legal cases, academic research, and popular media, Nadal reviews a wide range of issues—ranging from historical heterosexist and transphobic legislation to police brutality to the prison industrial complex to family law. Grounded in Queer Theory and intersectional lenses, each chapter provides recommendations for queering and disrupting the justice system. This book serves as both an academic resource and a call to action for readers who are interested in advocating for LGBTQ rights. Nick Pozek is the Assistant Director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia University in the City of New York and a host of New Books in Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Why is there such a deep partisan division within the United States regarding how health care should be organized and financed and how can we encourage politicians to band together again for the good of everyone? For decades, Democratic and Republican political leaders have disagreed about the fundamental goals of American health policy. The modern-day consequences of this disagreement, particularly in the Republicans' campaign to erode the coverage and equity gains of the Affordable Care Act, can be seen in the tragic and disparate impact of COVID-19 on the country. In Crossing the American Health Care Chasm: Finding the Path to Bipartisan Collaboration in National Health Care Policy (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Donald A. Barr, MD, PhD, details the breakdown in political relations in the United States. Why, he asks, has health policy, which used to be a place where the two sides could find common ground, become the nexus of fiery political conflict? Ultimately, Barr argues, this divide is more dangerous than ever at a time when health care costs continue to skyrocket, the number of uninsured Americans is rising, many state governments are chipping away at Medicaid, and the GOP has not let up in its efforts to dismantle the ACA.  Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

We often focus on enslaved people of color but Dr. Warren E. Milteer Jr.’s Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021) directs our attention to the people of color who were free -- and the complex web of intersecting values that led to significant inconsistencies in how they were treated and the institutions they built for themselves. Although many white southerners prized the racial hierarchy, Milteer insists that they also recognized other forms of hierarchy such as “gender, wealth, reputation, occupation, and family connections.” Engaging how these other forms of hierarchy intersected with racial categorization creates a rich history of how free people of color in the South negotiated legal regimes, political ideas, and institutions to carve out as much freedom as possible. Rejecting laws and political rhetoric as the only evidence for discerning the viewpoints of everyday people, Beyond Slavery’s Shadows places everyday people in their wider political and social contexts by drawing from an impressive catalogue of sources. The book accounts for how diverse political and social attitudes could coexist while it provides a remarkable history of law, colonization, taxes, labor, immigration, and gender. Dr. Warren E. Milteer, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is also the author of North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The political Left has long faced tension regarding its universalistic commitments and those to the nation it inhabits. The dilemma is captured succinctly in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that articulated leftist or progressive devotion to both man in the historic collective sense of human beings, as well as to the fellow members of a particular political community at the time of the French Revolution. That older tension persists at the same time that the left has increasingly today become associated with identity politics and such phenomena. So how can the Left square this circle between universalism and its own national community? In this episode of International Horizons, Emmanuel Dalle Mulle and Ivan Serrano authors of “Universalism Within: The Tension between Universalism and Community in Progressive Ideology”, discuss the concept and importance of universalism and how it is closely related to the conception of nation-states, creating a tension of values where the clashes between educated and non-educated translate into right-wing politics. Moreover, they explain the relationship between identity politics and universalism, and how the working class has shifted within politics in Europe and the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How and why did public opinions about gay marriage shift? In his new book, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture (New York University Press, 2018), Peter Hart-Brinson explores this question and more through public opinion data and interviews with two generations of Americans. By using these mixed methods of analysis, Hart-Brinson dissects generational change of attitudes toward gay marriage through interpretive, historical, and demographic analyses. This book contributes to the literature by building upon previous work and moving the discussion of generational change and attitudes forward. Concepts that are important for the book include differences between orientation and attraction, a difference in how the two generations Hart-Brinson interviewed speak about gay marriage. This book is accessible to a wide audience and will be of interest to family and public opinion scholars, as well as anyone interested in public attitudes or gay marriage specifically. This book would be a great addition to any graduate level course on families, as it gives a solid background of the history of the LGBTQ movement as well as attitudes shifts toward gay marriage. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2019),Benjamin Meiches takes a novel approach to the study of genocide by analyzing the ways in which ideas, concepts, and understandings about what genocide is and how it is to be prevented have become entrenched politically and intellectually. At the center of this analysis is what Meiches refers to throughout his text as the hegemonic understanding of genocide. Using what Michel Foucault describes as genealogy, Meiches set out to evaluate the process by which the concept of genocide has become intelligible. In doing so, Meiches offers significant evidence in support of many of the emerging critiques of the field of genocide studies. Meiches also inspires reflective and introspective thinking regarding the ways in which genocide scholarship contributes to the maintenance of a hegemonic understanding of genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Undercover investigators have been celebrated as critical conduits of political speech and essential protectors of transparency. They have also been derided as intrusive and spy-like, inconsistent with private property rights, and morally or ethically questionable. In Truth and Transparency: Undercover Investigations in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Alan K. Chen and Dr. Justin Marceau rigorously examine this duality and seek to provide a socio-legal context for understanding these varying views. The book concretely defines undercover investigations, distinguishes the practice from investigative journalism and whistleblowing, and provides a comprehensive legal history. Chapters explore the public need for investigations and the rights of investigators, paying close attention to the types of investigations that fall beyond the scope of constitutional protection. The book also provides concrete empirical evidence of the broad, bipartisan support for undercover investigations and champions the practice as an essential com-ponent of the transparency our democracy needs to thrive. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites. Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public. Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Why do we protect free speech? What values does it serve? How has the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment? What has the Court gotten right and wrong? Why are current debates over free expression often so divisive? How can we do better? In this succinct but comprehensive and scholarly book, authors Len Niehoff and Thomas Sullivan tackle these pressing questions. Free Speech: From Core Values to Current Debates (Cambridge UP, 2022) traces the development and evolution of the free speech doctrine in the Supreme Court and explores how the Court - with varying levels of success - has applied that doctrinal framework to “hard cases” and current controversies, such as those involving hate speech, speech on the internet, speech on campus, and campaign finance regulation. This is the perfect volume for anyone - student, general reader, or scholar - looking for an accessible overview of this critical topic. Len Niehoff is a professor from practice at University of Michigan Thomas Sullivan President Emeritus and Professor of Political Science at Vermont University Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Myra Tawfik's book For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law (U Toronto Press, 2023) addresses the contested history of copyright law in Canada, where the economic and reputational interests of authors and the commercial interests of publishers often conflict with the public interest in access to knowledge. It chronicles Canada’s earliest copyright law to explain how pre-Confederation policy-makers understood copyright’s normative purpose. Using government and private archives and copyright registration records, Myra Tawfik demonstrates that the nineteenth-century originators of copyright law intended to promote the advancement of learning in schools by encouraging the mass production of educational material. The book reveals that copyright laws were integral features of British North American education policy and highlights the important roles played by teachers, education reformers, and politicians in the emergence and development of the laws. It also explains how policy-makers began to consider the relationship between copyright and cultural identity formation once British interference into domestic copyright affairs increased, and as Canadian Confederation neared. Using methodologies at the intersection of legal history and book history, For the Encouragement of Learning embeds the copyright legal framework within the history of Canada’s book and print culture. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

On July 17, 2018, starting an unjust war became a prosecutable international crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Instead of collective state responsibility, our leaders are now personally subject to indictment for crimes of aggression, from invasions and preemptions to drone strikes and cyberattacks. Noah Weisbord, The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats (Princeton UP, 2019) is Noah Weisbord’s riveting insider’s account of the high-stakes legal fight to enact this historic legislation and hold politicians accountable for the wars they start. Weisbord, a key drafter of the law for the International Criminal Court, takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most consequential legal dramas in modern international diplomacy. Drawing on in-depth interviews and his own invaluable insights, he sheds critical light on the motivations of the prosecutors, diplomats, and military strategists who championed the fledgling prohibition on unjust war—and those who tried to sink it. He untangles the complex history behind the measure, tracing how the crime of aggression was born at the Nuremberg trials only to fall dormant during the Cold War, and he draws lessons from such pivotal events as the collapse of the League of Nations, the rise of the United Nations, September 11, and the war on terror. The power to try leaders for unjust war holds untold promise for the international order, but also great risk. In this incisive and vitally important book, Weisbord explains how judges in such cases can balance the imperatives of justice and peace, and how the fair prosecution of aggression can humanize modern statecraft. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Robinson Woodward-Burns is the author of Hidden Laws: How the State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, published by Yale University Press in 2021. Hidden Laws explores the relationship between both state and national constitutional development, debates, and reform. A sprawling study of American constitutional history, Woodward-Burns’s book shows how the federal government often deferred to state constitutional reform as a mechanism for dealing with national constitutional controversies. From banking to slavery, women’s suffrage to welfare, Woodward-Burns explores the myriad of ways constitutional controversies were debated and resolved in the United States. Woodward-Burns is an Assistant Professor at Howard University. Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with novel claims. By focusing on civil suits undertaken by women, indigenous groups, and the enslaved, Premo demonstrates a gradual shift from a justice-oriented system—focused on extralegal outcomes and casuistic jurisprudence—to a Enlightened law-oriented system—where ordinary litigants based their claims on natural rights, merit, and freedom. Such a transformation expanded through varied and diverse geographies; from metropolitan cities such as Mexico City and Lima, to rural indigenous regions of Oaxaca, and smaller, ethnically diverse, provincial cities such as Trujillo in Peru. As listeners will hear, The Enlightenment on Trial not only challenges traditional histories that have placed the origin of the Enlightenment solely in Western Europe, and in the minds of a few and select group of European men, but it also asks us to situate Latin America in a global conversation— one in which the ideas of ordinary citizens are the matter of intellectual history, and where our commonalities as humans are more important than our differences. This last point, as professor Premo reminds us at the end of the conversation, is an important lesson for our present, a moment in which arguments about radical alterity are used as a basis for exclusion. Instead, for Premo, it is important to highlight the histories that we share, the stories in which we all partake, and that we all need to recover from historical erasure. Lisette Varon-Carvjal is a graduate student in history at Rutger's University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Allison B. Wolf's Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) proposes a pioneering, interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice, which defines immigration justice as being about identifying and resisting global oppression in immigration structures, policies, practices, and norms. In contrast to most philosophical work on immigration (which begins with abstract ideas and philosophical debates and then makes claims based on them), this book begins with concrete cases and immigration policies from throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia to assess the nature of immigration injustice and set us up to address it. Every chapter of the book begins with specific immigration policies, practices or sets of immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Latin America and then explores them through the lens of global oppression to better identify what makes it unjust and to put us in a better position to respond to that injustice and improve immigrants’ lives. It is one of the first sustained studies of immigration justice that focuses on Central and South America in addition to the U.S. and Mexico. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Amidst all the talk of a green revolution what about the blue stuff? There are the seas that will wash over inhabited land, there’s the sea economy with fisherman and cargo crews facing hard times and, amidst all the debate about animal rights, where do sea creatures fit in? Professor Chris Armstrong author of A Blue New Deal: Why We Need a New Politics for the Ocean (Yale UP, 2022) with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Rancor reigns in American politics. It is possible these days to regard politics as an arena that enriches and ennobles? Matthew D. Wright responds with a resounding yes in his 2019 book, A Vindication of Politics: On the Common Good and Human Flourishing (UP of Kansas, 2019). Wright takes issue with the instrumentalist view of politics and walks readers through key debates in the field of natural law and the ideas of titans in it, primarily John Finnis and Alasdair MacIntyre but discussing along the way some of their peers such as Robert P. George and Mark Murphy. In the section of the book on the relationship of government and the state to family matters, Wright takes on the notions of Amy Gutmann and Robin West, which allow for a level of interference in the family sphere greater than conservative thinkers could ever conceive of countenancing. Not only are living thinkers addressed but so are such figures as Aristotle, Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln. Wright shows us how to conduct ourselves on the basis of civic friendship, another major theme in his book. With Wright’s help, we learn what terms such as “the common good” and “human flourishing” mean in both everyday life and in the field of philosophy. He clarifies what terms such as “political culture,” “political association” and “political community” mean and enables us to grasp what it means to “think institutionally” and what the “moral imagination” is. Wright is hearteningly hopeful and shows that being part of a political community is easier than we think, is character building and is more vital than ever. His book is indeed a vindication of a part of human society, politics, that we cannot escape and which encompasses everything from the workings of the individual family to what love, justice and virtue look like through the lens of politics. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this interview, I speak with Marion Holmes Katz about her latest book Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (Columbia UP, 2022). This fascinating book explores the question of wives’ domestic responsibilities from a Sunni Islamic legal perspective, covering scholarship from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. The book addresses questions such as, does the wife have the obligation to provide housework? What counts as housework? And if it is true that the wife is not obligated to perform any household labor, as many western Muslims believe, how did the Muslim tradition reconcile this ruling with the anecdote involving Fatima’s request to the Prophet Muhammad for help with household work because she is overworked? And how did Muslim scholars reconcile this idea with what they understood to be morally, culturally, or religiously correct behavior from a woman? If the wife does choose to perform housework, is she entitled to compensation from her husband?  For most Muslim scholars historically, answers to these questions involved distinguishing between ethical ideals and legal claims. Katz shows, for instance, that the discourse on women’s household labor evolves with time, context, geographical location, such that, for example, in the formative period, it was widely accepted that wives are not obligated to perform any household chores, but by the time we get to the 14th century, this doctrine is challenged. Overall, then, not only do scholarly views expectedly disagree with each other, but also, scholars are less interested in providing a set of generic rules about wifely duties and more in encouraging the fulfillment of duties as they’re understood in one’s own social location. In our conversation today, we discuss the book’s main contributions and its origins; a hadith report describing an incident about Fatima’s request to Muhammad for domestic help; what exactly domestic service means and who is required or obligated to provide it—and what that obligation means; what exactly is so ethical about household work, since this discourse is rooted in ethics for Muslim scholars; and how male scholars have historically treated domestic service. We end with some thoughts on discussions about Islamic law and domestic service from a class perspective; for example, where do poor men and poor wives fit into this discussion? What are their rights? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Professor Anna Spain Bradley "wrote this book to be accessible to anyone, because international law is for everyone." In this important book, Professor Anna Spain Bradley explores human choice in international law and political decision making. Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) investigates the neurobiological processes which shape human choice in the framework of international law and shows how human choice impacts decisions on peace and security. Professor Spain Bradley charts important decisions in the international human rights framework to show how human choice has affected decisions about genocide, international intervention into armed conflict and nuclear weapons, and human rights.  This is an important book which has the potential to change the way we think about human choice in law, and the implications of human choice in the lives of all people, for whom decisions are made. Professor Spain Bradley calls for a rethink about how we understand human choice, especially in relation to what international law does and what it should do.  Professor Anna Spain Bradley is Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an award-winning international law scholar, educator and expert specializing in international dispute resolution, international human rights and combatting global racism.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime (Basic Books, 2023), political historian Dr. Sam Lebovic uncovers the troubling history of the Espionage Act. First passed in 1917, it was initially used to punish critics of World War I. Yet as Americans began to baulk at the act’s restrictions on political dissidents and the press, the government turned its focus toward keeping its secrets under wraps. The resulting system for classifying information is absurdly cautious, staggeringly costly, and shrouded in secrecy, preventing ordinary Americans from learning what their country is doing in their name, both at home and abroad. Shedding new light on the bloated governmental security apparatus that’s weighing our democracy down, State of Silence offers the definitive history of America’s turn toward secrecy—and its staggering human costs.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (UNC Press, 2019) draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive. Sophie White is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is an historian of early America with an interdisciplinary focus on cultural encounters between Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, and a commitment to Atlantic and global research perspectives. This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

China has the reputation for being a strong security state. After the pro-democracy Tiananmen protests, the Chinese government moved to increase stability maintenance – and that approach is reflected in today’s suppression of social unrest in Xinjiang where somewhere between 800,000-2 million members of the Uighur minority have been interned in camps. Throughout the country, the government has maintained stability by installing millions of cameras. The Chinese and International press emphasize these actions – projecting a view of China as a strong security state.  But Suzanne E. Scoggins argues that the decision to prioritize stability maintenance comes at the expense of everyday policing. In remarkable interviews with police officers and analysis of policing journal articles she assesses resource allocation, police reforms, and structural patterns of control – to find a weak police force unable to protect citizens against violent crime. Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest (Cornell UP, 2021) provides a surprising – and more accurate – understanding of how the police function in China – how they can be so ineffective at everyday crime management while still being very good at stability maintenance. The podcast includes a remarkable conversation about how research access in China is changing – as well as the role of the National Committee on US-China Relations. Dr. Suzanne E. Scoggins is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Asian Studies at Clark University. She is also a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow at The National Committee on United States-China Relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In one of the most “exciting and engaging” (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War. For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis―one of our most celebrated scholars of American history―throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with “surprising relevance” (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (Liveright, 2021) returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black. Taking us from the end of the Seven Years’ War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the “band of brothers”; Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former master. Countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” Ellis demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the founding―slavery and the Native American dilemma―problematic at best. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people has steadily increased in recent decades, a counter-development has taken place at the same time: in many places, new deterrent walls and militarized border crossings are being created. Borders have also become increasingly selective. Supported by digitalization, they have been upgraded to smart borders, and border control has expanded spatially on a massive scale, even becoming a global enterprise that is detached from territory.  Steffen Mau shows how the new sorting machines create mobility and immobility at the same time: for some travellers, borders open like department-store doors, but for others they remain closed more firmly than ever. While a small circle of privileged people are allowed to travel almost everywhere today, the vast majority of the world’s population continues to be systematically excluded. Nowhere is the Janus face of globalization more evident than at the borders of the 21st century. Originally published in German in 2021, this new English edition was translated by Nicola Barfoot. Steffen Mau is Professor of Macrosociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His recent works include The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social (2019) and Inequality, Marketization and the Majority Class: Why Did the European Middle Classes Accept Neo-Liberalism? (2015). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine. The book reflects on the limits of progress that legislative reform may make, and the way that increased regulation can actually limit access to rights protections. Broadly transferrable beyond its specific field, this book will be useful to socio-legal scholars, feminist scholars, trans scholars, policy makers and practitioners. Dr Chris Dietz is a Lecturer at the Centre for Law & Social Justice at The University of Leeds.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Constitutional Ratification Without Reason (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on constitutional ratification, the procedure in which a draft constitution is submitted by its creators to the people or their representatives in an up or down vote determining implementation. Ratification is increasingly common and routinely recommended by experts. Nonetheless, it is neither neutral nor inevitable. Constitutions can be made without it and when it is used it has significant effects. This raises the central question of the book: should ratification be recommended? Put another way: is there a reason for treating the procedure as a default for the constitution-making process? Surprisingly, these questions are rarely asked. The procedure’s worth is assumed, not demonstrated, while ratification is generally overlooked in the literature. In fact, this is the first sustained study of ratification.  To address these oversights, this book defines ratification and its types, explains for the first time the procedure’s effects, conceptual origins, and history, and then concentrates on finding reasons for its use. Specifically, it builds up and analyzes the three most likely normative justifications. These urge the implementation of ratification because the procedure: enables the constituent power to make its constitution; fosters representation during constitution-making; or helps create a legitimate constitution. Ultimately, these justifications are found wanting, leading to the conclusion that ratification lacks a convincing, context-independent justification. Thus, experts should not recommend ratification as a matter of course, practitioners should not reach for it uncritically, and—more generally—one should avoid the blanket application of concepts from democratic theory to extraordinary contexts such as constitution-making. Jeffrey Lenowitz is the Meyer and W. Walter Jaffe Associate Professor of Politics at Brandeis University, focusing on political theory. His research explores the the procedures uses to create new constitutions; constituent power and constitutional theory; the concept of legitimacy in the social sciences; voting ethics; and other aspects of democratic theory and institutional design.  Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law