New Books In Law

Political Scientists Dan Mallinson and Lee Hannah, both experts on state-level politics and the policy making process, have a new book that focuses on the state-level process of legalization of medical cannabis across the United States. Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States (NYU Press, 2024) is a book that needed to be written, since it is an important exploration not only of the continuing policy conflicts and tensions around marijuana in the United States, but it specifically focuses on how states have taken up this issue and what they each did in moving towards medical marijuana’s accessibility. The marijuana question in in the United States remains a fascinating federalism dynamic, with national laws in conflict with state laws, and state laws operating in different ways, around both medical marijuana and legalized recreational use of cannabis. Mallinson and Hannah provide the reader with an excellent overview of policymaking designs and theories since their analysis takes up so m

Kitty Calavita, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, discuss the historical context and implications of Operation Wetback, a 1954 U.S. mass deportation of Mexican immigrants, and its relevance to President-elect Donald Trump's proposed mass deportation plans. Calavita explains that Operation Wetback aimed to address the economic utility of undocumented workers and political backlash against them, particularly during a recession and Cold War rhetoric. She highlights the logistical challenges of such operations, including the integration of immigrants into various industries and the legal protections against random stops. Calavita suggests that while high-profile roundups may occur, a massive deportation campaign is unlikely due to economic and logistical obstacles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century generated audacious ideas of freedom. Following decolonization, the challenge was to give an institutional form to those ideas. Through an original account of India's constitution making, Legalizing the Revolution explores the promises, challenges, and contradictions of that task.  In contrast to derived templates, Dasgupta theorizes the distinctively postcolonial constitution through an innovative synthesis of the history of decolonization and constitutional theory. Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the contentious transition from the tumult of popular anticolonial politics to the ordered calculus of postcolonial governance; and then explains how major institutions – parliament, judiciary, rights, property – were formed by that foundational tension. A major contribution to postcolonial political theory, the book excavates the unrealized futures of decolonization. At the same time, through a criti

On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free? George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebe

Football is the national game in the United States – and many families and friends bond over their love of the sport. While few people play professional football, many participate in tackle football as children and adolescents. In the last decades, more attention has been paid to the dangers of playing tackle football, including traumatic brain injury and the degenerative brain disease, CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). As more former players donated their brains, the rate of CTE surprised even those already concerned with traumatic brain injury. If the risks are so great, why do more than two million American children under the age of 18 continue to play tackle football? Is it the opportunity to contribute to a team? Overcome adversity? Test personal limits? In Tackle Football and Traumatic Brain Injuries: Law, Ethics, and Public Health (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg asks readers to think about American tackle football as an industry – like the American tobacco industry – that sells a

How can we protect diverse cultural expressions in an era of huge technological change? In Technology, Intellectual Property Law and Culture: The Tangification of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2024), Megan Rae Blakely, a lecturer in law at Lancaster University, examines the contemporary international legal context for heritage. The book uses three detailed case studies of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, considering heritage in many different forms, from tourism and nation branding through to language and clothing. Rich in detail, but accessible for a those who are not specialists in law, technology, or heritage, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how best to support and preserve the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the oth

How does a Black man in Austin get sent to prison on a 70-year sentence for stealing a tuna sandwich, likely costing Texas taxpayers roughly a million dollars? In America, your liberty--or even your life--may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If the same man had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it's unlikely that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the world. We have more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world's biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? What are the costs--socially, economically, and politically--of having the world's largest population of ex-prisoners? And what can we do about it? In The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America (Rowman &

This is the final episode of Cited’s most recent season, Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise, a season that tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. They will back with a new season focussed on environmental politics in early 2025, so make sure you are subscribed to the podcast (Apple, Spotify, manual RSS). The MAGA movement scores big wins by taking cheap shots at experts. Now, some worry that Donald Trump could try to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The typical centrist position is to defend the supposedly impartial, apolitical expertise of such figures. Yet, we know that is not exactly right either. Is there a better way to imagine a better bank? In our first segment, we speak with Frances Coppala, author of The Case for People's Quantitative Easing. It’s something of a case study in Fed politics, revealing how their decisions post-Global Financial Cris

An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics. The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What's more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees--a

An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics. The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What's more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees--a

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves.” We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing members of a community. Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their claims to rights? How does Bryson deal with the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things, and with the likelihood that as AI advances, robots will appear more human? If the robot as slave is an unacceptable idea - even in metaphorical form - then what other metaphors might help us think through our relationships with thinking machines? Music by aiva.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm

What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Dr. Laura F. Edwards uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles—clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats—a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entree into the new rep

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.” China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and disput

Saadia Yacoob’s excellent new book, Beyond the Binary: Gender and Legal Personhood in Islamic Law (U of California Press 2024), makes a compelling argument about gender and Islamic law that has been shockingly overlooked: Legal personhood in Islamic law is intersectional and relational, and gender is not a binary. While Muslims commonly treat gender as a fixed, stand-alone category in Islam that fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status, Yacoob shows that that legal status in Islamic law was not determined by fixed categories of male or female but by a complex web of social hierarchies, including class, age, freedom, enslavement, social status, and lineage. She challenges the conventional binary understanding of gender by drawing on a rich array of historical, early Hanafi texts from the ninth to twelfth centuries. With insightful coverage of topics such as marriage, slavery, and sexual ethics, Yacoob finds that the categories of man and woman are unstable and conditional in Islamic law. In fact, she

The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its alleged ability to harm and corrupt young people and indeed society as a whole, the genre is constantly under pressure to suppress that which has made it so popular to begin with - its ability to frighten and generate discussion about society's darker side.  In The Myth of Harm: Horror, Censorship and the Child (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Sarah Cleary analyses controversies, myths, and falsehoods surrounding the genre of horror. Focusing on five major controversies, the text examines how horror media has become a scapegoat for political and social issues, platforms for “moral entrepreneurs” and tools of hyperbole for the news industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime. In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common,

I spoke with an accomplished attorney and innovative law professor Rodger Citron of the Touro Law School about the complex relationships between history and... yes, law. We talked about how the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals after World War II shaped the US legal philosophy. We dug into themes like the tensions between originalism and evolving interpretations of the Constitution and how judges’ personal histories impact supposedly objective rulings. We discussed Judge Irving Kaufman (famous for sentencing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death in 1951) and how his complex legacy offers insight into the human dimension of the judiciary. We also discussed a recent Supreme Court case, Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Company, to illustrate the evolving (and surprising) tensions between originalism and "Living Constitution" approaches to law. With serious legal questions bound to arise during Trump's second term as president, and a bloody land war raging in Europe, this is a timely topic for anyone eager to u

In this week’s episode we step into conversation with Keith Whittington about his new book, The Impeachment Power: The Law, Politics, and Purpose of an Extraordinary Constitutional Tool (Princeton UP, 2024), we explored the historical and constitutional dimensions of impeachment in American politics. Whittington provided a detailed account of how the Founders intended impeachment to function as a safeguard against executive overreach. We discussed the evolution of impeachment cases, from Andrew Johnson to more recent examples, examining how political partisanship and public opinion have shaped its application over time. Whittington also reflected on the implications of impeachment for the health of democratic institutions and constitutional governance today. It was an enlightening discussion on one of the most important, yet often misunderstood, mechanisms in the U.S. Constitution. Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Whittington’s teaching and scholarship span American

There has been a lot of commentary from scholars and journalists as to the meaning of Donald Trump’s three appointments to the United States Supreme Court – with regards to changes in jurisprudence, increased separation of the Court from political processes that legitimate it. Drs. Kirsten Widner and Anna Gunderson have done something a little different using tools from political science.  Their new book, The Haves and Have-Nots in Supreme Court Representation and Participation, 2016 to 2021 (Cambridge UP 2024), examines how the changing composition of the US Supreme Court affects who participates in advocacy before the Court. Who thinks to bring a case to the Supreme Court and has that changed since three new justices were appointed during the presidency of Donald Trump? Their book argues that Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett have changed the behavior of both litigants (people bringing cases) and amicus curiae (groups that write briefs in support of either side). Their study demonstrates