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

This is part #3 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast mini-series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the last episode of the (ir)Rational Alaskans, Riki Ott, Linden O’Toole, and thousands of other Alaskan fishers won over $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In our finale, while Ott and O’Toole wait for their cheques, Exxon fights back with a legal and academic appeal. In that appeal, they marshal some of the most-respected scholars of our generation. The (ir)Rational Alaskans is a partnership with Canada’s National Observer. You can also read about this story in Jacobin. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. Programming Note: This marks the end of our returning season, the Rationality Wars. We will back with another season shortly, sometime this fall. If you want to catch that season, make sure to stay subscribed to our podcast feed (Apple, Spotify, RSS). You can also stay updated by following us on X (@citedpodcast), and you can contact us directly at info [at] citedmedia.ca if you have any questions or any feedback. Finally, if you are impatient and just itching for more content, check out some of our other episodes, like: the other episodes in this season, if you joined up late; the episodes from last season, especially America's Chernobyl; or some of the highlights from our other podcast, Darts and Letters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In our pursuit of efficiency in the lower criminal courts, have we lost sight of quality justice? Through the critical examination of original stenographic data, Over-Efficiency in the Lower Criminal Courts: Understanding a Key Problem and How to Fix it (Policy Press, 2024) by Dr. Shaun Yates demonstrates how an English Magistrates' courthouse often pursued managerial efficiency to the detriment of social justice and procedural due process values. Given that these courts process more than 95% of all criminal cases, this ‘over-efficiency’ problem has the capacity to cause significant social harm. Dr. Yates’ work concludes by providing socio-legal and criminological readers with ways to fix this over-efficiency problem. This accessible work is of value to policy makers and post-graduate students alike. 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

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Today's guest is Christopher Robertson, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. His background and research interests overlap several academic disciplines, including bioethics, health law, incentives, behavioral economics and more. His CV includes a PhD in philosophy and a law degree from Harvard. His newest book is Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What can be Done About (Harvard University Press, 2019). Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In June of 2019, a proposed amendment to Hong Kong’s Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, sparked widespread protests across the region. Protestors saw in the bill a threat to the judicial independence that Hong Kong has enjoyed since its return to China from the United Kingdom in 1997. The Special Administrative Region plunged into turmoil as disaffected youth combined the ideology the Arab Spring with their fluency in emerging digital tools to organize and mobilize a seemingly leaderless movement. The demonstrations which continue into 2020 have challenged the city’s government, universities, and communities and even test families and friendships. On the first anniversary of the beginning of this wave of anti-government protests, South China Morning Post released a new book Rebel City: Hong Kong's Year of Water and Fire (World Scientific, 2020) Rebel City presents some of the most comprehensive coverage of Hong Kong’s political unrest. Editors Zuraidah Ibrahim and Jeffie Lam masterfully weave together the perspectives gathered by the intrepid reporters of Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. The book is not only a carefully curated selection of contemporaneous news coverage, but it also offers thoughtful reflections and penetrating insight into a pivotal moment for Hong Kong. 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

Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press) asks: What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline. Debjani Bhattacharyya is Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She was a Junior Fellow of the American Institute of India Studies, and a former Research Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden. Currently, she is a visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

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

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

The title of Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar,’s new book poses the question that comes up every presidential election cycle: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Harvard University Press, 2020). Keyssar presents the reader with a deep, layered, and complex analysis not only of the institution of the Electoral College itself, drawing out how it came about at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of the many attempts over more than two centuries to reform it or get rid of it. This is an historical subject with keenly contemporary relevance, as we move into the final stretch of the 2020 election cycle, and we consider how the political landscape, party platforms, and the shape of the presidential race all look the way they do because of the Electoral College. Keyssar unpacks the discussions and debates at the Constitutional Convention about how to elect a president, and then dives into the immediate response to the Electoral College as it was implemented in the new system. In going through the history of the Electoral College itself, and the points of contention between the popular vote tallies and the Electoral College results, as well as the many, many attempts to reform or eliminate the Electoral College, Keyssar highlights the two points in American political history when we came closest to doing away with this means of electing the president. The Era of Good Feeling (1815-1825)—when there was really only one functioning party, and the party system itself was in flux as party competition shifted—saw a significant effort to revise the Electoral College and the contingent election system that had been used when no candidate received a majority of the votes and the House of Representatives must designate a winner. Keyssar also maps out the efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s to pass an amendment to the Constitution to replace the Electoral College with direct popular vote. This legislation was filibustered in the Senate by senior Southern Democratic and Dixiecrat senators who saw the disproportional voice that the Electoral College gave to the Southern states—states where the Black vote had been significantly diminished because of regulations and threats that made it extraordinarily difficult and dangerous for African Americans to vote. Keyssar explains that this was known as the “5/5 rule”—in contrast to the 3/5th rule in the Constitution—whereas the southern states were able to count all Black citizens are part of their populations and preclude all of them from voting. Why Do We Still Have The Electoral College also traces the internal shifts within the states as they moved from their initial approach to the distribution of electoral college votes to the establishment of the “unit rule” or “general ticket” that allocates all of a state’s electoral college votes to the winner in that particular state. Not only have there been attempts to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, but there is a long history of the efforts to reform or eliminate the general ticket/unit rule. Keyssar brings the reader forward to the contemporary period through a number of different threads as he outlines multiple dimensions of reform attempts and their failure, all while providing the reader with a deep history of debate about the structure and function of the Electoral College. This unique aspect of the American constitutional system also reflects the continuing impact of the role of race in American politics and political institutions. For those interested, curious, or confused, this book is truly a tour de force on the Electoral College. 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

In her latest book, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press), Kathryn Sikkink puts forward a framework of rights and responsibilities; moving beyond the language of rights that has come to dominate scholarship and activism, she makes the case that human rights cannot be truly implemented unless we also recognise that there are corresponding obligations to implement those rights. Recognising that talk of responsibility, obligation and duty are often unpopular - because people do not like to be told what they ‘should’ do - Sikkink advocates that we rethink how we conceive of responsibility – it should not be limited to backward-looking blame attribution, but should be expanded to become one of forward-looking responsibility; instead of just asking who is to blame, responsibility should be expanded to ‘what together can we do?’ In making this argument, she focuses on five key areas – climate change, voting, digital privacy, freedom of speech, and sexual assault - to demonstrate how responsibility is engaged. She provides many examples of grass-roots initiatives where people can choose to adopt the rights and responsibilities model for collective action. There are fewer more pertinent concerns for our times. Sikkink’s book will make you rethink your own responsibilities, and as a citizen of the world, ‘what together we can do’. Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The updated paperback edition of Hate: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press) dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. As "hate speech" has no generally accepted definition, we hear many incorrect assumptions that it is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm. Yet, government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. "Hate speech" censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, this book shows that "hate speech" are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Therefore, prominent social justice advocates worldwide maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous "counterspeech" and activism. New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen, the immediate past President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. Arya Hariharan is a lawyer in politics. She spends much of her time working on congressional investigations and addressing challenges to the rule of law. You can reach her via email 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

Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative justice practitioners of color—mostly women—who have fiercely unearthed realities about devastation caused by white practitioners who have unthinkingly worked without a racial or social justice consciousness. This book is thus a wake-up call for European-descended restorative justice practitioners as it is validating for Indigenous practitioners and practitioners of color and enlightening for anyone wishing to explore the intersections of indigeneity, racial justice, and restorative justice. The authors of Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities are Desirée Anderson, Rochelle Arms Almengor, Michelle Armster, Belinda Dulin, Leon Dundas, Sharon Goens-Bradley, Janice Jerome, Gaye Lang, Erica Littlewolf, Shameeka Mattis, Abdul-Malik Muhammad, Christianne Paras, Christina Parker, Gilbert Salazar, Victor Jose Santana, Barbara Sherrod, Johonna Turner, Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla, Anita Wadhwa, Sheryl R. Wilson, and Robert G. Yazzie. Dr. Edward C Valandra, Waŋbli Wapȟáha Hokšíla is Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ and was born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. He has served his Sičáŋǧu Thitȟuŋwaŋ Oyáte nation on the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council, as an Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC) Board of Directors representative, and as his nation’s seven-member Constitutional Task Force. 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

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'?  A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France (Oxford UP, 2024) is an original and wide-ranging account of the impact of the religious wars on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical accounts. Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers' illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In her new book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press), Gema Kloppe-Santamaría examines the history of violence enacted by groups against alleged transgressors who claimed to bring justice while acting beyond the rule of law. Focusing on the 1930s to 1950s, this book explores the roots of a phenomenon often mistakenly assumed to be a result of neoliberalism in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Kloppe-Santamaría finds that extralegal violence was not a response to the absence of the state nor to increased crime levels, nor is it connected to traditional practices. Instead, lynching is a complex, political act that commonly occurred in urban and rural communities in Mexico. In these locales, the state was not absent, but some citizens rejected its forms of justice and deplored modernization programs that sought to remake their everyday practices. But state officials could condone or even participate in lynchings. Communities also used extralegal justice to correct perceived crimes against the Church and Catholic values, or to target threatening individuals who could be accused of witchcraft or other mythical offenses. The Mexican press avidly covered lynchings as spectacles, but the press did not always decry lynching and often suggested it was a necessary, moral act in the absence of speedy, fair legal justice from the state. This book is in dialogue with scholarship on lynching in the United States and illustrates the relevance of the Mexican case for scholars of extralegal violence in other places. Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Loyola University Chicago. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her book manuscript in progress is titled Study Abroad, Transnational Youth, and the Politics of Modernization in Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational education program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects. Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She has published widely on human rights, humanitarianism, sovereignty and war. She is author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben, (SUNY 2013) and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019) and an editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. More of her research is available here: https://unsw.academia.edu/JessicaWhyte Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University 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

The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. For the UK’s financial sector, which accounts for 7% of the country’s economy and a million of its jobs, whether there is such an agreement and what shape it takes really matters. In Brexit and Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-editors Jonathan Herbst and Simon Lovegrove have corralled 26 lawyers from 12 leading firms and chambers to explain why. Between them, they cover the history of the withdrawal process, the likely impact of Brexit on regulations of everything from how bankers are rewarded for success to how insolvent banks are wound up, and what could happen next in the negotiations. Jonathan Herbst is Global Head of Financial Services Regulation at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. 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

Sara Mayeux is the author of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Free Justice explores the rise, both in the idea and practice, of the public defender throughout the 20th Century. More than just a strict legal history of the profession, Dr. Mayeux’s work looks beyond the confines of the courtroom or law firm to explore how the public defender was representative of changing ideas of not just law, but American identity. Free Justice expands our knowledge of how and why public defenders became as ubiquitous as they are today. Dr. Mayeux is an Associate Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to advance their security and political interests. Ultimately, the book contends that African states have managed to instrumentally and strategically use the international justice system to their advantage, a theoretical framework that challenges the “justice cascade” argument. The empirical work of this study focuses on four major themes around the intersection of power, states’ interests, and the global governance of atrocity crimes: first, the strategic use of self-referrals to the ICC; second, complementarity between the national and the international justice systems; third, the limits of state cooperation with international courts; and fourth, the use of international courts in domestic political conflicts. Oumar Ba is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College. The draft manuscript on which his book was based was the 2019 International Studies Association (ISA) Northeast Scholars’ Circle honoree. In 2020, Opinio Juris hosted a symposium on States of Justice, and Africa is a Country hosted a discussion on race and international relations with Oumar Ba and Samar al-Bulushi. Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Renisa Mawani’s Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press), take us to 1914, when the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history. Renisa Mawani is currently Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia and recurring Chair of the Law and Society Program. Other affiliations at UBC include: Faculty Associate, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, the Institute for Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice, Green College, and the Science and Technology Studies Program. Mawani is the author of Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are 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

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores legal history at Princeton 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 his book From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), Will Smiley examines the emergence of rules of warfare surrounding captivity and slavery in the context of Ottoman-Russian military rivalry between 1700 and 1878. This remarkably well-researched and carefully argued monograph uncovers a vibrant inter-imperial legal regime, challenging many conventional narratives about the expansion of modern international law and the European states system. Its pages provide ample material with which we can rethink the supposed linear decline of Ottoman state power and the nature of pre-modern diplomacy, sovereignty, and governance in Eurasian empires. While traditional accounts of modern international law mainly focus on intellectual and political developments in the Western world, Smiley shows how two states on the European periphery worked out their own rules – their own international law governing the movement of captives, slaves, and prisoners of war across imperial frontiers. The story that emerges is not one of the Ottoman state’s joining an outside system of law. On the contrary, both in the eighteenth century and the even more challenging nineteenth, the Sublime Porte actively shaped the rules by which it was bound. Will Smiley is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of New Hampshire and a historian of Eurasia, the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and international law. Vladislav Lilić  is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields. Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for 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

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Colin Rose, Assistant Professor of History at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada, about his new book, A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Seventeenth-century Bologna saw a severe uptick of homicide, the result of several factors that we discuss here. Beyond just a discussion of the book and its impact on our understanding of early modern Italy, Colin talks about his source material in detail, providing a small primer on the workings of an early modern criminal court. This makes for a lively conversation between two very happy historians about the joys of archival work. Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How does the United States use immigration to suppress free speech? Should interests of “national security” take priority over individual liberties? What happens to democracy when the most vulnerable are denied their right to speak and exchange ideas? In Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian and lawyer Dr. Julia Rose Kraut argues that ideological exclusions and deportations are rooted in political fear of subversion – and the United States has used these exclusions and deportations continuously from the 18th to 21st centuries to suppress free speech. The book explores the constitutionality of ideological restrictions and exclusions as interpreted by American courts – as well as the specific intersection of American immigration and First Amendment law – through a political, historical, legal and personal lens by following the lives of real people as well as key court decisions. The book chronicles the actions of those we know (e.g. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, Charlie Chaplin, Carlos Fuentes, and J. Edgar Hoover) as well as some that we may have forgotten (e.g. Ernest Mandel, Leonard Boudin, Carol King, and Frank Murphy). At issue for Kraut is the essence of American liberal democracy and the rule of law. She fears a national identity rooted in fear of the threat of dissent and political repression rather than J.S. Mill’s marketplace of ideas and free exchange of ideas. The actions of the Trump administration on immigration have put a recent spotlight on this issue – and Kraut’s book concludes with the Travel Ban – but she details how immigration law has been used throughout American history to suppress dissent and radical change. Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1978, immigrants in America have always had their First Amendment rights violated on the basis of their values, ideas, and associations. These violations are often backed by the Supreme Court as immigrants are judged more greatly on their immigrant status than in accordance with first amendment rights. Threat of Dissent systematically reveals the ways immigration law is used by officials to intimidate, threaten, and repress foreigners. Kraut unveils this, criticizing not only the damaging effect this has on immigrants’ lives themselves, but additionally the overall damage this does to the idea of American liberal democracy and the overstep of executive power. The podcast includes a discussion of the recent SCOTUS decisions on DACA and the recent passage of the NOBAN Act by the House of Representatives on July 22, 2020. Bernadette Crehan assisted with this podcast. 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) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How could a peasant in Shandong in the Qing dynasty come to know enough about a specific law that he felt confident enough to kill his own wife and his lover’s husband and think that he could get away with it? As Ting Zhang’s new book, Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China (University of Washington Press, 2020) shows, there was a whole range of ways: he could have read the entire statute himself, in either an official or a commercial edition of the Qing Code, or found a simple explanation of it in a popular legal handbook. He could have heard a community lecture on it, or seen the statute dramatized on stage. The state might have intended or tried to control the popular dissemination of legal information, but thanks to commercial printing and a thriving book market, legal knowledge circulated and disseminated far and wide in the Qing – right down to a peasant with murder on his mind. Circulating the Code is a beautiful combination of legal history and print culture history. Comparing different official and commercial editions of the Qing Code, handbooks for litigation masters, and manuals for community legal lectures, it explores the production, circulation, and reception of legal knowledge in Qing China, shows how the dissemination of legal information transformed law, and challenges assumptions about the state monopolization of accurate legal knowledge in the Qing. Wonderfully detailed, lucidly written, and packed full of fascinating books, this is a must-read for anyone interested in legal history, the history of the book, and in thinking about comparative histories of print culture and commercial publishing. Ting Zhang is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu books and Manchu translations and loves anything involving a good kesike. 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

It is often said that bioethics emerged from theology in the 1960s, and that since then it has grown into a secular enterprise, yielding to other disciplines and professions such as philosophy and law. During the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of secularism in biomedicine and related areas was encouraged by the need for a neutral language that could provide common ground for guiding clinical practice and research protocols. Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, in their pivotal The Principles of Biomedical Ethics, achieved this neutrality through an approach that came to be known as "principlist bioethics." In Pastoral Aesthetics: A Theological Perspective on Principlist Bioethics (Oxford University Press, 2019), Nathan Carlin critically engages Beauchamp and Childress by revisiting the role of religion in bioethics and argues that pastoral theologians can enrich moral imagination in bioethics by cultivating an aesthetic sensibility that is theologically-informed, psychologically-sophisticated, therapeutically-oriented, and experientially-grounded. To achieve these ends, Carlin employs Paul Tillich's method of correlation by positioning four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care, drawing on a range of sources, including painting, fiction, memoir, poetry, journalism, cultural studies, clinical journals, classic cases in bioethics, and original pastoral care conversations. What emerges is a form of interdisciplinary inquiry that will be of special interest to bioethicists, theologians, and chaplains. Nathan Carlin is Associate Professor and the Samuel Karff Chair in the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Why did the DREAM Act (for the Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) never pass Congress – even though it was popular with Republicans and Democrats? What does the political and legal history tell us about American federalism? How is the legal history of the DREAM ACT and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) tied to the legal bureaucracy of residence? In Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of the DREAM Act and DACA (NYU Press, 2020), Michael A. Olivas marshals his experiences as both attorney and teacher to unpack the overlapping laws, politics, and politics of immigration – demonstrating how the financial aid laws, age of majority requirements, and rules for establishing domicile establish carrots and sticks that lead to inept and unjust immigration policy. The book provides a much needed legal and political history of the DREAM Act that spans over two decades from its introduction in Congress (2001) to the Trump Administration challenge of legality in the Supreme Court (2017). Olivas uses Plyler v. Doe (1982) as an entry point. A revision to Texas law in 1975 allowed the state to withhold funds from local school districts for educating the children of undocumented people. The Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteen and recognized the right of undocumented to attend public schools. Olivas sees SCOTUS’s ruling as the beginning of immigration reform, particularly for undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children. Twenty-First century immigration reform has included racist narratives, fearmongering, and misinformation. Perchance to DREAM pulls the lens back to reveal the many times that immigration reform has been less polarized and expose the lack of traction. Despite covering the law and wider institutional struggles, the book highlights the pain that individual DREAMers that have suffered. Towards the end of the book, Olivas highlights poems including Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s La Vida es sueño and Langston Hughes’s Harlem to capture the yearning and disappointments of the DREAMers. Yet Olivas insists “I do not approve. And I am not resigned” noting that the fight for immigration reform is far from over. In the podcast, Olivas offers insights on the June 18, 2020 Supreme Court decision in. Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of California in which the Court ruled 5-4 to overturn. The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end the DACA policy on narrow, procedural grounds. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. 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) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Legal and political theories are not descriptions of brute facts. Nor are they merely postulated ideals or aspirations. Theories reflect and are reflected in our social relationships … Moral and political values thus cannot and should not be discussed in isolation from the institutions and social histories that shaped them. – N.E. Simmonds cited in Raymond Wacks, Understanding Jurisprudence (2005) Considering the law as a social phenomenon intrinsic to political economy is key to engaging the work in this new volume of scholarly articles edited by Professor Poul Kjaer – The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020). The book is relevant on many levels to the events unfolding around us including unresolved issues between the private and the public realms (e.g., think banking and government in relation to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008). Current manifestations (post-book publication) include the ruling of the German Constitutional Court in May, which at core, appears to challenge the legitimacy of EU law for German financial interests. However distant such regulatory and legal matters may, at first appear, the idea that theories ‘are reflected in our social relationships’ anchors a more general observation made in this book’s introductory chapter concerning theoretical architectures as differentiating ‘between a holistic or a differentiation-based worldview, that is, between an understanding of society as a whole, which is larger than the sum of its parts, or an understanding of society as a mere collection of differentiated parts.’ In this NBn episode, Professor Poul Kjaer distinguishes such concepts among others, and sets the context for those with an interest in learning about ‘the law and political economy’ as a field of study including an explanation of the differences between the European and American approaches to this field. Some other points of elaboration include more detailed thoughts on his introductory chapter, his previous books dealing with governance and governing, corporatism’s many guises, intermediary institutions as key locations for social integration and dis-integration, the concept of crisis and how law regulates the economy and politics, with Georg Simmel, in a sense, underlying it all with the question: ‘how is society possible?’ Professor Kjaer explains key concepts and thinkers in this field as he provides a lay of the land as surveyed from the ‘Copenhagen School’. He also shares his impressions with the book editing process, and some of the more foundational concepts and sources. The book brings ‘together an exceptional group of scholars’ providing a ‘novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts’. This volume’s many contributions cover legal subfields ‘ranging from competition and consumer protection law to labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy.’ It should be added that the 15 chapters are compellingly written, and the book is available in hardcover and Kindle. Poul F. Kjaer is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark with a research focus on European and global governance, the law and political economy. 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

How can we understand the legacy of colonialism within contemporary society? In Bordering Britain Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nadine El-Enany, a senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, historicises immigration law and ideas of citizenship in Britain, connecting the project of building a nation after the end of empire to whiteness, colonial violence, and racism. The book analyses legislation and case law, along with the social and historical context of immigration in Britain, to demonstrate the continued, systemic, violence at the heart of the British state. The book is essential reading across law, history, and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary society. 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 The Hidden History of International Law in The Americas: Empires and Legal Networks (Oxford University Press, 2017), Juan Pablo Scarfi shows the central role of a coterie of elite Latin American jurists and intellectuals in constructing a Pan-American inflected conception of international law. In exploring the rise of so-called “American” international law, Scarfi’s monograph contributes to the now burgeoning literature on the rise of global governance, by showing how many of the legal ideas that came to serve as the foundation of organizations like the United Nations were first experimented with in Latin America. While much previous work on international law during the twentieth century has often left Latin America out of the picture or given it a peripheral role, this important monograph positions Latin America at the center of the development of modern ideas about international law and highlights the global legal networks that allowed for spirited exchanges between Latin American, North American, and European legal elites. Juan Pablo Scarfi is a Research Associate at the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and teaches international relations and international law at the School of Politics and Government at the National University of San Martín, Argentina. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve? Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations (Anthem Press, 2020). Harris is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and is the leading U.S. authority on racial profiling. Also the author of Profiles in Injustice (2002). he hosts the podcast Criminal Injustice. Topics covered in this episode include: Harris’s vantage point on what the Minnesota legislature got right and only half-right in recently approving a police accountability measure in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Why navigating fear and anger is so hard for both black suspects and the police alike. What role a lack of familiarity – and trust – plays for officers and suspects in trying to avoid escalating their encounters. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Throughout history, too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to voting. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress's ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all. Drawing on troubling stories of state attempts to disenfranchise military voters, women, African Americans, students, former felons, Native Americans, and others, Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted. He shows how a constitutional right to vote can deescalate voting wars between political parties that lead to endless rounds of litigation and undermine voter confidence in elections, and can safeguard democracy against dangerous attempts at election subversion like the one we witnessed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The path to a constitutional amendment is undoubtedly hard, especially in these polarized times. A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy (Princeton UP, 2024) explains what's in it for conservatives who have resisted voting reform and reveals how the pursuit of an amendment can yield tangible dividends for democracy long before ratification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In her new book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Harvard University Press, 2020), historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky traces the origins of the President’s cabinet in American government. Chervinsky combines the history of the American Revolution with studies of early American political institutions to illustrate how the cabinet developed. Exploring the cabinet’s inception, Chervinsky argues that traditional narratives about the cabinet don’t tell the whole story and, in fact, that the cabinet itself is a rather under-researched aspect of the American presidency. While George Washington did build the cabinet and, even more importantly, made use of the cabinet in developing policy and seeking input and advice, Chervinsky reveals that it was not until well into Washington’s first term that the cabinet really came into full usage, and this was only after Washington had experimented with other options. The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution traces how the cabinet evolved in a kind of organic fashion, as Washington needed more input and, in an interesting comparative context, as the Senate provided less engaged advice and consent than had been anticipated at the Constitutional Convention. Chervinsky highlights how Washington’s inaugural cabinet established and protected executive authority setting a precedent for future cabinets and helping to define the scope of executive power in the new constitutional system. Chervinsky’s book takes a chronological approach, starting in the revolutionary period and working forward through Washington’s two administrations. She begins by exploring Washington’s military experience, especially his leadership of the military, and explains how this experience informed his decisions around creating and using the cabinet while president. Chervinsky describes how, during the American Revolution, Washington relied on councils of war to provide advice and help him to make key decisions. He designed the cabinet to advise him in a similar fashion. Chervinsky also discusses the first cabinet secretaries—figures who were themselves quite well known, like Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Knox—and how their individual experiences shaped the offices they held. The Cabinet notes that the way in which the first ministers debated issues created a model for the president’s cabinet as an enduring institution. Chervinsky concludes her chronological study looking at how the cabinet became permanent in response to crises including the Neutrality Crisis of 1793, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, and Jay Treaties of 1795-1796 (which also involved the development of executive privilege). Finally, Chervinsky considers the ramifications of Washington’s creation and use of the cabinet. She explains how the public came to think about Washington’s cabinet and his secretaries, while also comparing Washington’s cabinet practices to more contemporary ones. The Cabinet weaves together a fascinating history of the institution itself while providing an understanding of how it evolved as an institution within the new constitutional system and, in particular, how it operates with the president, carving out a space for a more authoritative executive. Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. 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

Paulo Drinot’s The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drinot analyzes the rules and norms that governed prostitution and venereal disease in this period, and tracks how regulation of prostitution was implemented in the early twentieth century, and then seemingly abandoned in the 1950s. Drinot’s story foregrounds the many agents that intervened in this process: prostitutes––or sex workers as we may call them today––but also government officials, physicians, journalists, feminists, among others. Set in a global and comparative framework, this book centers on Peru, a country that came “late” to the regulation of prostitution, and did so under arguments that combined concerns about public health and ideas about proper female and male sexuality. The Sexual Question goes beyond the history of prostitution for it also sheds light on broader processes such as the medicalization of society and the construction of the nation-state in Latin American societies. Race figures prominently in this story: throughout this period, the regulation of prostitution was accompanied by the racialization of disease, and the policing of certain groups deemed especially dangerous or in need of protection (Afro-Peruvians and indigenous groups for example). This is a timely book, not only for those listeners concerned with Latin American history, but also for those who are interested in sexuality, the state, race, and medical history more generally. A must for our listeners! Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate 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

When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy (Oxford University Press) examines issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy. Uniquely comprehensive in scope, this trailblazing volume offers cutting-edge chapters on the intersections of race/ethnicity within the context of child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and adoption, familial incarceration, school discipline and the "school-to-prison pipeline," juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, and jurors' perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants. The book also includes chapters focused on troubling situations that are less commonly researched, but growing in importance, including the role of race and racism in child sex trafficking and US immigration law and policy. Thus, individual chapters explore myriad ways in which law and policy shape the lives of marginalized children and adolescents - racial and ethnic minorities - who historically and presently are at heightened risk for experiencing disadvantageous consequences of law and policy. In so doing, The Legacy of Racism for Children can help social scientists to understand and work to prevent the perpetuation of racial discrimination in American laws and public policies. Margaret C. Stevenson is Associate Professor at the University of Evansville. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and an edited volume related to jury decision-making. Bette L. Bottoms is Professor of Psychology and Dean Emerita of the Honors College at The University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a past president of APA's Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice and Section on Child Maltreatment. Kelly C. Burke is a doctoral candidate in the Social Psychology Program at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research on the influence of prejudice and case evidence (e.g., body-worn camera footage) on juror decision making has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books and funded by the American Psychology-Law Society's Diversity Research Award and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Grant-in-Aid Award. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this conversation is sociologist Jan Doering, whose new book Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the strategic practices of two groups in that city’s Rogers Park and Uptown neighborhoods: “public safety” advocates, or people who were very concerned with crime and active in a variety of local initiatives to address it; and “social justice” advocates, or people who were more concerned with resisting gentrification and keeping their neighborhood racially and socioeconomically diverse. In documenting their efforts and clashes through three years of fieldwork, Doering focuses on two forms of racial claims-making each camp of residents uses to make its case: racial challenges, or charges of racially problematic behavior, and racial neutralizations, or any defensive or reparative responses to racial failings. Revealing links between how anticrime initiatives can amplify gentrification and contribute to marginalization through the invocation of race as they negotiate the politics of crime and gentrification, the book provides a highly nuanced, and quite timely, analysis of everyday battles over racial meanings with great resonance for today’s political climate. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), and editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2019) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Sovereignty (Northwestern University Press, 2020) playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle weaves together two stories separated by 170 years but joined by a common dilemma: how can Cherokee people fight for justice under an unjust colonial legal framework? In present-day Oklahoma, Sarah Ridge Polson attempts to bring her abuser to justice using the Violence Against Women Act. In 1835, her ancestors try to defend the inherent jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation against the encroachments of the state of Georgia. Nagle combines her art as a playwright with her training as a lawyer to craft a taught legal drama that illuminates the complexities of these issues. This is a play about how history is always with us, even when that history has been repressed for generations. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@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

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda about her book Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program (University of Pennsylvania Press). Migrant Citizenship exams the Farm Security Administration’s Migratory Labor Camp Program, and its role in the daily lives of a diverse number of farmworker families. Martínez-Matsuda thoroughly investigates the way public policy was used to intervene in the lives of migrant workers, and how these workers sought to transform their own lives and the country around them through appealing to American democratic principles and forming movements to pursue social justice and civil rights. Martínez-Matsuda’s study showcase the many ways that the FAS’s history, and these migrant workers, is integral to understanding both historical and modern struggles in farm labor relations. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda is an Associate Professor at Cornell University’s ILR School. 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

Before Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race? In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (Vice Dean and a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego) demonstrate how highly (and often overly) qualified woman are shortlisted by presidents -- from Herbert Hoover to Donald Trump -- to create the appearance of diversity before a (white) man is selected to preserve the status quo. Short-listing isn’t success but symptom of a problem. Jefferson and Johnson’s research in presidential libraries, private papers, oral histories, the Nixon tapes, and biographies reveals that presidents as early as Herbert Hoover began discussing female candidates – though presidents set aside overly qualified women for decades. The first half of this nuanced book explores the first woman considered (Florence Allen), five judges who were on the short lists of JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and female judges who were short-listed alongside Sandra Day O’Connor (including the first Black female judge, Amalya Lyle Kearse). The histories of each candidate map onto the waves of feminism, reflect on the role of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, and allow the authors to identify the harms of short-listing. The details are revealing about both past and present and the second half of the book addresses how to apply the lessons learned from these decades of paying lip-service to diversity. How can candidates transition from shortlisting to selection? Jefferson and Johnson discuss tokenism, the burdens of being a gender spokesperson, racism, ageism, and the binds of femininity and “respectability.” The authors demonstrate how the selection of women for the Supreme Court impacts other aspects of the legal system and beyond. Although the number of men and women entering law school and entry-level legal positions are equal, the rate at which men reach leadership positions is considerably faster than women. This phenomenon can be seen in many fields where there is a pursuit of professional advancement. The authors conclude with strategies such as “collaborating to compete” to reform the American legal system. Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast. 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) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). 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 Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (NYU Press, 2020), Pat Zavella shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across racial lines provides a compelling model for other groups to successfully influence change. In the context of the war on women's reproductive rights and its disproportionate effect on women of color, and increased legal violence toward immigrants, The Movement for Reproductive Justice demonstrates that a truly intersectional movement built on grassroots organizing, culture shift work, and policy advocating can offer visions of strength, resiliency, and dignity for all. Dr. Pat Zavella is Professor Emerita in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the author of I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty and coauthor of Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Historians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but strong pathways of commercial, intellectual, and legal exchange. Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale UP, 2020) recasts our view of France’s empire by evaluating the interwoven trajectories of the people, like itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the long eighteenth century. Imperial subjects like these sought political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, especially in regards to slavery, war, and trade. Courts became liaisons between France and new colonial possessions. Byline: Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia’s manuscript, Young Subjects, examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website. 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 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors. He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live. Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance (tough on crime policing policies) in Puerto Rico from the 1990s to the present. As in the United States, LeBrón shows how increased investment in policing did not respond to a spike in crime. It actually emerged as a strategy to shore up the local political and economic establishment mired in the crisis of the archipelago’s postwar colonial development policy “Operation Bootstrap,” spiking unemployment, lack of U.S. investment, and a growing informal economy which included the drug trade. Puerto Rican elites hoped to reinvent themselves as models for tough on crime policing and gatekeepers for the United States to Latin America. Beginning with the mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) policy of commonwealth Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, police increasingly targeted lower income, predominantly Black public housing complexes (caseríos) as sources of criminality and lawlessness. Using Justice Department reports, social media research, newspapers, and oral interviews to create a “police archive,” LeBrón demonstrates that while police killings, brutality, surveillance, and harassment were hallmarks of mano dura, the policy also reinvented popular understandings of the “who” and “where” of crime that endure to the present. In doing so, she shows how presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality linked to certain places (public housing, sex work neighborhoods, schools, and universities) created notions of victims and criminals who “deserved” life or death. The book’s second half explores critiques of and resistance to punitive governance by looking at underground rap, university student activism, social media debates, and non-punitive anti-violence activism. These case studies show the growing resistance to policing as policy instead of social investment, but also the tenacity of the discourses of criminality activists must wrestle with today. LeBrón is also the author of the forthcoming Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books) and the co-creator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus. Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (Harvard UP, 2019), Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility. Herzog describes how successive European legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the establishment and growth of the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was understood, used, and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition. Expanding the definition of Europe to include its colonial domains, Herzog explains that British and Spanish empires in the New World were not only recipients of European legal traditions but also incubators of new ideas. Their experiences, as well as the constant tension between overreaching ideas and naive localism, explain how European law refashioned itself as the epitome of reason and as a system with potentially global applications. Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University, and Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850 (Palgrave MacMillian, 2019) offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities—Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa—Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750–1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions of slavery in the Italian states. Giulia Bonazza is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the international project Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (CIRESC-CNRS Paris). Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University 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