New Books In 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

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 co

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 choice

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

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

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 Mor

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,

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

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

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

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 th

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. Compa

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 o

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

Alexandra DeSanctis is a Staff Writer for National Review and a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She joins Madison's Notes to discuss abortion, the Pro-Life movement in America, the state of free speech in journalism, and more! You can read Bari Weiss's letter of resignation here. 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 (

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

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 Instituti

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://

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