New Books In Law

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton, which ruled that the Title VII prohibition on sex discrimination in employment extends to discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status, may imperil the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in line with their values. This right is examined brilliantly in the 2016 book, To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy by scholar Melissa Moschella. Given the rise of the transgender movement and other aspects of wokeism, this book has only increased in importance. It is a rare combination of a serious scholarly work and a book that general audiences, particularly and crucially, the parents of school-age children should read. Moschella addresses timely questions such as, “Can we defend parental rights against those who believe we need more extensive state educational control to protect children's autonomy or prepare them for citizenship in a diverse society?” and draws upon psychological

Colleen Murphy is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law at the College of Law and a professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Colleen also directs the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program in the Illinois Global Institute. You can follow her on Twitter at @drcolleenmurphy. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Melvin Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. You can follow Melvin on Twitter at @MRogers097. Professor Rogers specializes in democratic theory, with special focus on the traditions of American and African-American politics. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Anyone who has taken any interest in the politics of Thailand at all in the last two decades could not help but have noticed the part that the country’s judiciary has played in them. Whereas before the 2000s the courts had at best a peripheral role in political life there, in recent years judges have at times weighed in dramatically on high-stakes conflicts. The causes and consequences of these judicial interventions are the subjects of a new book by Duncan McCargo, Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2019). McCargo sets as his task to explain who Thai judges are, how their minds work, and why they became so invested in politics from 2006 onwards. He critiques the courts in Thailand as suffering from what he calls hyperlegalism, while also offering sympathetic portraits of judges he met and observed at work. His abiding concern is with the relationship of the bench to the crown, and with how by taking a virtuous position in defence of the monarchy judges lost oppor

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet. In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveillance capitalism to show how today’s data-hungry communications technologies have poisoned our political institutions, our minds, and even our environment. Deibert believes that it is not too late to rescue our politics from our technology, and he argues that the answer lies not in silicon or code but age-old political principles. Look to Montesquieu, not Zuckerberg, Deibert tells us, if you want to find a stable framework for digital governance in the 21st century. On this episode, in addition to all the above, Professor Deibert and I explore the economic engines of surveillance capitalism, the dangers of ritualistic

There has recently been a sharp increase in cases where corporations have been sued by street and graffiti artists because their artworks had been used and exploited without the artists’ authorization, for example in advertising campaigns, as backdrops in promotional videos, or as decorating elements of products. This trend shows and confirms that these forms of art are vulnerable. They are actually more exposed to unauthorized exploitation (and destruction as well) than works of fine art, because they are placed in the public eye. Protecting Art in the Street: A Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Dokument Forlag, 2020) explains, with words and images, how copyright laws apply to street art and graffiti, and how they can be of help to creators within these artistic communities. Knowledge about these issues does matter. There has recently been a spike in legal actions or complaints against corporations and individuals that have tried to exploit commercially street artworks without the artists’ cons

How do we understand the nuances of efforts by Christian conservatives to affect American law – and evaluate their success? What lessons do they hold for other social movements? Dr. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, associate professor of politics at Pomona College and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson, professor of Political Science at the University of Denver join the podcast to discuss Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right's Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture (Oxford UP, 2020) The book evaluates whether activists pushing for lawyers and judges with a Christian Worldview have been able to achieve their goals and transform American legal culture. This impressive book contributes to our general understanding of social movements, legal mobilization, and constitutional development – but also the specifics of how the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (CCLM) has attempted to transform American law from secular and liberal to Christian and natural. While many people know of The Federalist Society’s attempts to in

“The autarkic European nation-state, if it ever existed, was the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless it is the myth of the self-sufficient nation-state that lies at the heart of much scholarship on post-WWII European integration,” writes Signe Rehling Larsen in The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2021). “Instead of interpreting the EU in line with previous projects of market creation through empire and federation, the story of the post-WWII project of European integration is often interpreted as a ‘conflict’ or ‘competition’ between the Union and the Member States as the dominant forces in a zero-sum game”. Without taking sides in Europe’s proxy culture war, Larsen’s ground-breaking new book of “political jurisprudence” dispenses with the state as a template for the EU. Rather, she examines the “federal union of states” in America before the Civil War, Germany’s 19th-century experiments with confederations, and the imperial experience to unders

Much of the world's politics revolve around questions about the development of the international market for drugs; the roles merchants, government officials, and drug manufacturers played in shaping this market over time and space; and the process of globalization. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for individuals and for the planet in the future. Kenneth V. Faunce's new book Heavy Traffic: The Global Drug Trade in Historical Perspective (Oxford UP, 2020) helps students to understand globalization not as an inevitable or natural process, but instead as one that is created by and responds to a variety of human motivations. Examining the international trade in coffee, alcohol, opium, heroin, and cocaine, which have had a significant impact on economies and societies in countries around the world, it offers insight into globalization as a historical process, thereby helping to make sense of today's interconnected world

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2021) provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). It examines the evolution of different juridical models of inheritance--in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common--against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively. Christopher T. Fleming reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. Fleming attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us? In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences in CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (The MIT Press, 2021). Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention. The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also c

Even without the loss of the City of London from its jurisdiction, the EU has gone through a decade-long revolution in financial supervision and regulation since Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008. The directives and regulations introduced in the wake of the crisis took years to negotiate, implement and stress-test against political reality in the last five years. The second wave of the crisis, which exposed the “doom loop” between fiscally weak states and their pet banks, spawned the European Banking Union but left some crucial remedial work undone. In this update of their 2015 edition of European Banking and Financial Law (Routledge, 2020), Matthias Haentjens and Pierre de Gioia Carabellese provide a comprehensive description and analysis of this growing body of new law, its origins, and policy implications. Matthias Haentjens is professor of law, director of the Hazelhoff Centre for Financial Law at the University of Leiden, and a deputy judge in the district court of Amsterdam. *His book recommendations

Is the Indo-Pacific already the most dominant in terms of global power, politics, and wealth? In his newest book, Michael R. Auslin considers the key issues facing the Indo-Pacific which have ramifications for the entire world. Geopolitical competition in the region threatens stability not just in Asia, but globally.  In a series of essays, Asia's New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) Auslin examines the key issues that are changing the balance of power in Indo-China and globally. He examines China's aggressive global policies and strategies, and its attempts to bend the world to its wishes.  He argues that the global focus on the Sino-US competition for power has obscured "Asia's other great game" - the rivalry between long-time foes, China and Japan. He questions whether Kim-Jong-un can control his nuclear weaponry and the implications for safety if he cannot.  Auslin examines the plight of women in India and asks whether its "missing women" are potentially h

A core duty of government is keeping those it governs safe. However, in modern democratic states, government is structured by a Constitution, which establishes constraints and checks on the power of any one office. But emergencies – from natural disasters to terrorist attacks – often call for a swift response that presses against those constraints and checks. In the United States, the President has claimed the authority to do what’s necessary to secure and protect the American people. Can such claims be squared with a commitment to the Constitution? In Overcoming Necessity: Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism (Yale 2021), Thomas Crocker argues for a conception of American constitutionalism that can address the need for government to respond to emergencies without losing its normative bearings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From facial recognition to online shopping, artificial intelligence has become the backbone of the internet and has led to an unprecedented extraction and utilization of personal data. As a result, AI has rapidly outpaced existing free speech, privacy, and national security law. In The Centaur’s Dilemma: National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution (Brookings Institute Press, 2020), Judge James E. Baker deploys his extensive experience in national security law to argue for AI regulation through legislation. By first tackling the creation of a precise definition of artificial intelligence, Judge Baker then vividly explains the national security applications and implications of AI. In part two, he goes about suggesting a purposeful, legal framework for addressing those national security applications and implications while exploring legal arguments in the absence of clear laws. This timely and insightful work provides an accessible primer of AI for legal generalists while demonstrating how technologists ca

Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora.  In Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (U Illinois Press, 2020), GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physi

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.  In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces

How do you hold a government accountable for crimes it refuses to acknowledge?  Today's book, The International People's Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide (Routledge, 2019) emerges out of the International People's Tribunal for 1965. Rooted in a longer tradition of People's Tribunals, the IPT was an effort to remind civil society of the mass violence in Indonesia beginning in 1965 and to exert pressure on the Indonesian government and military to acknowledge the violence, hold perpetrators accountable and provide redress for victims. Today's guests played a prominent role in organizing and supporting the IPT. Their book serves as something of a history of the IPT and a summary of the evidence provided. But it also serves as kind of survey of the field at a critical moment in the study of the violence. In the interview, we talk about the IPT and its origin, organization and outcomes. We also try to situate the IPT in the broader context of scholarship about mass violence in Indonesia. And we talk a

Political scientist Lara Brown’s new book, Amateur Hour, is a complex and important multi-method study of the presidency, starting from the original conception of the office at the constitutional convention and George Washington’s role as the first occupant of the office. The centerpiece of Amateur Hour: Presidential Character and the Question of Leadership (Routledge, 2020) is the focus on our understanding—from the time of Washington, through Lincoln, to the contemporary period—of the role that character should play, but often has not, of late, in terms of the person elected to the White House and how they conduct themselves in the office and as a leader. Brown’s analysis interrogates the scholarship around the concept of presidential psychology and leadership, while unpacking the connections between leadership in this complicated elected office and how we have, more recently, elected presidents who are often lacking in experience, and why this is problematic.Amateur Hour integrates historical analysis of A

F. B. Chang and S. T. Rucker-Chang's Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles the movements for - and expressions of - equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights and paradigms in Romani studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices