New Books In Law

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020). In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Chase

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue of human trafficking in Eurasia. In her 2020 monograph Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia (Policy Press, 2020), Dr. Dean analyzes the development and effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies and institutions in Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, explores challenges to crafting and enforcing policies and aiding victims, and evaluates best practices based on country-to-country comparison. We discuss common misconceptions about human trafficking, the impact of institutionalized gender inequalities on efforts to combat labor and sexual exploitation, the mixed results of United States and Western European involvement, the challenges of controversial fieldwork as an American scholar in Eurasia, and the book’s key takeaways for policy makers and activists. Dr. Dean also introduces the Human Trafficking Policy Index -

When Americans think about trials of Holocaust perpetrators, they generally think of the Nuremberg Trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann or perhaps of the Frankfort trials of perpetrators from Auschwitz. If they think of Polish trials at all, they likely assume these were show trials driven by political goals rather than an interest in justice. Gabriel Finder and Alexander Prusin's book Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (University of Toronto Press, 2018) shows that the truth was considerably more nuanced. The book is a comprehensive account of the trials of Nazi perpetrators conducted in liberated and postwar Poland. But it’s more than that—it’s a reflection on how politics impact justice, on what trials can teach us about perpetrator behavior, and on the ways in which ordinary Poles responded to the Holocaust. Finder and Prusin show that the trials were shaped by their political context. But this context allowed and sometimes encouraged the participation of a variety of act

Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines the development of African legislatures from their colonial origins through independence, autocracy and the transition to multi-party rule. In it, Ken Ochieng’ Opalo seeks to explain the different trajectories that African legislatures have taken, why some have become stronger than others, and what are the conditions that allow for democratic institutions to emerge from an autocratic system. The book combines a broad historical analysis of legislatures throughout Africa with the comparative case studies of Kenya and Zambia. It employs both quantitative and qualitative data to support the argument that despite the limitations imposed by autocratic rulers, the seeds for the development of strong legislatures can be planted during periods of non-democratic rule. The author presents a dynamic and well-argued model for the study of legislatures in post-colonial states, and argues for a more nuanced and

In Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2020), Minou Arjomand provides a startling account of the many intersections between theatre and trials in Germany and the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s. Through case studies of Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, and Edwin Piscator, Arjomand explores the use of trials as a theatrical form, as well as what theatre theory might tell us about political justice. In doing so, Arjomand demonstrates that calling a trail theatrical is not a criticism but merely a starting point. In considering what type of justice is possible in a trial, we must ask what theatrical conventions are being used, and to what ends. Arjomand’s book both allows us to see pivotal theatrical artists in a new light and poses profound questions about the nature of theatre itself. 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 Ari

Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police are supposed to serve. Criticism of the militarization of police, concerns about the rise of the private security industry, and the long-standing belief that policing should be controlled by municipal governments suggest that police should be civilians who defend the public interest, and that they should be accountable to the communities that they serve. In Violence Work: State Violence and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018), Micol Seigel exposes the mythical nature of the civilian/military, public/private, and local/national/international boundaries that supposedly delimit the legitimate sphere of policing in a liberal democratic society. Focusing on the employees of the Office of Public Safety, a branch of the State Department that provided technical assistance to police forces in developing countries from 1962 until it was closed amid controver

In Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration (Cornell University Press 2018), Robert C. McGreevey explores the contested meaning and limits of citizenship for Puerto Ricans from the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s. This timely monograph brings together legal, cultural, and labour history to understand the complicated ways that Puerto Ricans on the island and on the US mainland challenged racialized notions of fitness for citizenship. The narrative that results from such an approach presents US power as a dynamic, contested, and transnational. This monograph suggests the deep historical resonances between the early history of US formal control of the island and the contemporary second-class status of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. McGreevey’s monograph will interest scholars of the United States in the world, legal historians, historians of Latin America, and historians of migration. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history

We are all familiar with the story of how in early 1919 heads of state and diplomats from around the world came to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with a defeated Germany and its allies. Many of us are aware of how nationalists such as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, the future Hồ Chí Minh, tried to gain access to the official meetings. But far fewer of us know of the roles played of activist women such as the French Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, the African American Ida Gibbs Hunt, and the Chinese Soumay Tcheng. In her new book Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World (Columbia University Press, 2020), Professor Mona L. Siegel explores the previously neglected history of a diverse group of women from around the world who fought for women’s rights as male politicians forged a new world order. Written like a true global history, Peace on Our Terms links the meeting rooms of Paris to street demonstrations in Cairo to the revolutionary underworld of Shanghai. Not only does Siegel g

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were Segregated examines the history surrounding how modern housing segregation was purposefully planned out beginning at the turn of the 20th Century. Looking at the intersection of transnational finance, suburban developers, and local, regional, and federal policymaking, Glotzer illustrates the myriad of people and institutions involved in simultaneously creating the idea of the modern suburb and racializing housing. Paige Glotzer is an Assistant Professor of history and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 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

Robert Nichols, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Minnesota, has written an engaging and important examination of the clash between the western theoretical approaches to the idea of property and possession and the understanding of land property and possession held by indigenous peoples in a variety of societies settled by Anglophone colonizers. Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke University Press, 2019) pulls together or bridges intellectual traditions, bringing indigenous political thought into conversation with critical theory and Anglo social contract theory, centering on the different understandings of property, ownership, and possession. Nichols weaves together a variety of different ways of thinking about the questions of property and possession, examining the language that is applied to the concept of property and how this also defines our understanding of possession and dispossession as well as the dichotomous ideas of property and theft. He also t

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections (Georgetown University Press, 2020), Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore how election officials work, how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process. Using original data gathered from state and local election officials and policymakers across the United States, Hale and Brown analyze innovations in voter registration, voting options, voter convenience, support for voting in languages other than English, the integrity of the voting process, and voting system technology. The result is a fascinating picture of how we vote now and will vote in the future. Join us to hear them talk about the book and its implications for the 2020 election. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy

In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Alison D. Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes draw on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women to explore Mayan women’s agency in their search for truth, justice, and reparation for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book discusses the complexities of navigating, negotiating, and interpreting informal and formal justice processes, as participated in and experienced by protagonists, women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries. Jeff Bachman is a senior lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of the United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the relationship and edito

Although much has been written about the anti-abortion movement in the United States, Jennifer Holland (Assistant Professor of U.S. History, University of Oklahoma) has written the first monograph-length history of the pro-life campaign for American hearts and minds. In her book Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020), Holland explores the development of the movement from the legalization of Roe v. Wade in 1973 to the present with a focus on its cultural, social, political, and religious dynamics particularly in the American West, based in part on 28 oral histories collected from its activists and leaders. In this interview, we discuss the evolution of the movement’s rhetoric and tactics, including the manipulation of histories of oppression including slavery and the Holocaust to further anti-abortion campaigns, the cooption of concepts like morality and ethics, the uses of fetal imagery in protests and promotional materials, the achievement of legislat

Political Scientist Daniel Q. Gillion’s new book, The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an incredibly topical and important analysis of the connection between protests and the influence this public activism has on the voting electorate. Tracing the idea of the “silent majority” from Richard Nixon’s characterization of his supporters in the 1960s through to contemporary uses of the term in the 2016 campaign by then-candidate Donald Trump, Gillion examines the construction of this binary framework, that there is a silent majority at home and a vocal minority in the streets, making noise; he also argues that the idea of the silent majority might not apply in our current polarized political world. The Loud Minority brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives to examine protests—weaving together research and analysis from sociology, history, and political science to more fully understand the protests themselves, but to also get at the impacts

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, history, oral history, and democratic theory to illuminate a 21st century, premediated legal strategy to disenfranchise voters of color. In Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression (NYU Press, 2020), Daniels establishes the context of 21st-century voter suppression then focuses on the importance of the Voting Rights Act in discouraging voter suppression – and the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). She elucidates the types – and impacts – of voter deception with attention to possible impacts on the presidential election in 2020. Throughout the work, she connects past an

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Semper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications con

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

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t interviews Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam of University of Kentucky on the new book, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019), which explores how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. In this study of how neoliberal ideas limit citizenship for marginalized populations in Hong Kong, Shui-yin Sharon Yam examines how three transnational groups—mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents—engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives. Coupling transnational feminist studies with research on emotions, Yam analyzes court cases, interviews, social media discourse, and the perso

Criminal responsibility is a key-organizing concept of the criminal law, but Arlie Loughnan argues that it needs re-examination. Focusing on the Australian experience, Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2020) questions assumptions about the rise and prominence of criminal responsibility from the late colonial period until recent times. The focus on significant events since the turn of the twentieth century draws out the complexity of criminal responsibility and how its assumed neutrality obscures dynamics of subjectivity, rationality and power in the criminal system. This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Anyone interested in legal philosophy, Australian history, criminal law and also discrimination will find this book invaluable. Self, Others and State will make you question what you know about the law and reveal your own assumptions about its doctrines and principles. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at