New Books In Law

The areas of the Law and psychoanalysis overlap in interesting and compelling fashion in the new book, Psychoanalysis, Law, and Society (Routledge, 2019) edited by Adrienne Harris and Plinio Montagna. The book is far reaching and covers where the law and psychoanalysis intersect in diverse areas such as family dynamics, feminism, philosophy and the environment. The authors included here are international experts with experience with the law and the consulting room. In this interview I was able to speak with several of them, Harris, Montagna, Laura Orsi and Elizabeth Allured, and we engaged in a lively discussion that also addresses the current Covid-19 crisis. This is a relevant book that will help therapists to incorporate legal ideas and philosophy into their everyday clinical practice. You can reach Christopher Bandini at @cebandini. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam M. Sowards is professor of history at the University of Idaho and a leading environmental historian. His new book, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), builds on his recent biography of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to describe what happened when a major copper corporation set out its plans to establish a massive mine in Washington state. With the Wilderness Act (1964) unable to protect this area of outstanding beauty, conservationists set out to apply moral rather than legal strategies of resistance. This excellent new book shows how ordinary citizens banded together to achieve what the law could not – and how market forces ultimately worked to save Miners Ridge. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Purita

Yaacov Yadgar discusses his new book, Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Peter Bergamin. An important and topical contribution to the field of Middle East studies, this innovative, provocative, and timely study tackles head-on the main assumptions of the foundation of Israel as a Jewish state. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, Yaacov Yadgar provides a novel analysis of the interplay between Israeli nationalism and Jewish tradition, arriving at a fresh understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through its focus on internal questions about Israeli identity. By critiquing and transcending the current discourse on religion and politics in Israel, this study brings to an international audience debates within Israel that have been previously inaccessible to non-Hebrew speaking academics. Featuring discussions on Israeli jurisprudence, nation-state law, and rabbinic courts, Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis will have fa

In Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), Toshihiro Higuchi presents a history of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, by which the then-nuclear powers, US, USSR, and UK, agreed to cease, among other things, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, largely moving such tests underground (the Chinese and French continued atmospheric tests in subsequent decades). Higuchi examines the development of knowledge about nuclear fallout, the dissemination and often suppression (mostly by governments of the nuclear powers) of that knowledge during the eighteen years book-ended by the 1945 Trinity Test and the signing of the 1963 Treaty. Political Fallout also considers the legacy of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which reduced fallout but was followed by an accelerated arms race and buildup of nuclear arsenals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (Oxford University Press, 2020), Paul Matzko details its emergence in the 1950s and the response to its rise by some of the leading political and religious institutions of the era. As Matzko explains, the origins of postwar conservative media lay in the broader changes taking place in broadcasting in 1950s. As the major networks shifted their focus from radio to television, local radio stations were eager to find programmers willing to pay to put programs on the air. This gave conservative religious broadcasters such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis an opportunity to spread their message to a nationwide audience. Fearing the growing influence of commentators organizing against their policies, the Kennedy administration sought to use such means as the previously underdeveloped Fairness Doctri

John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon K. Winford's John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal

In One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), Jia Lynn Yang recounts the personalities and debates that brought about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which forms the foundation for modern U.S. immigration policy. Undoing the xenophobic national origins quotas enshrined in the 1924 Immigration Act required an epic, forty-year struggle against nativist concerns about the economy and national security, as well as racist and anti-Semitic impulses that continue to plague American society today. Drawing on key scholarly monographs as well as her own research in archives like the LBJ Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, Yang’s narrative is full of larger-than-life characters. Some, like Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, will be familiar with readers. Others, like Congressman Emmanuel Celler of New York and Japanese American Citizens League national secretary Mike Masaoka, are well-known but less well understood.

What do you think about these days when you hear the words, “Supreme Court?” Salacious news coverage of the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh? Gushing profiles of feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg? High school and vaguely recalled lectures about cases the details of which you dutifully read (or didn’t and flunked the test on) like McCulloch v. Maryland or Marbury v. Madison? Or, in this age on the Coronavirus and the sudden need to determine as a citizen what the respective powers of governors and presidents are in times of crisis, are you suddenly aware that a grasp of seemingly arcane terms like “enumerated powers” is imperative for each and every one of us and not just constitutional scholars? Are you suddenly out of a job and thinking now of attending law school and are not sure you could master the material? Have you suddenly found yourself homeschooling a bright late adolescent in need of a text and an associated online resource about the key legal cases that have determined our destiny as a nati

Sonali Chakravarti, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wesleyan University, has written a thoughtful analysis of the role of the jury in American democracy, with specific attention to the way that the jury experience can provide the structure for more substantive civic engagement. Part of the impetus for this study comes out of the more recent controversial decisions made by juries in a variety of high-profile cases in the United States. The research also evolved out of Chakravarti’s earlier work on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how citizens were incorporated into the process of transitional justice and engagement in democratic spaces. In Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Chakravarti argues that the jury room is an important democratic space that is generally ignored as an opportunity to engage citizens in active participation in and with the law. Because we generally are not trained or taught about the actual pro

Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emotional bonds, or would this be an unethical evasion of the hard work that keeping a marriage going requires? What if someone has sexual desires that they consider immoral – should they be able to take a drug to suppress those desires, or alternatively can society force them to? Debates about the ethics of using drugs for enhancement rather than treatment usually focus on the individual, such as doping in sports. In Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020), Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu consider the case for using drugs to alter our love relationships. Earp, who is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and and Health Policy at Yale University, and Savulescu, the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, note that drugs that alter sexua

In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing so? How did the law, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded to such murders? In which instances did the monarch decide to forgive or show leniency, and when did justice opt for harsher punishment? In answering these questions, Uribe-Urán challenges some traditional notions of how honor is supposed to work in Iberian societies. Also, he contributes to a growing scholarship that demonstrates that far from being secluded in their homes, women in colonial Spanish America had active public lives. This book is a fascinating re

Hong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the streets, in shopping malls, in residential buildings. Driven by Hong Kong’s young people with their ‘Be Water!’ strategy, the pro-democracy movement grew into a massive force, receiving support from all demographics – from the ‘silver-hairs’, to mothers, from healthcare workers, to journalists and bankers, the ongoing protests polarized the community and changed the urban city space, likely forever. In City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong (Scribe, 2020), Antony Dapiran builds on his previous work City of Protest. He explores the 2019 protest movement, how it has changed the city and what Hong Kong means for the world. Dapiran gets you as close to the action as you can be, without having to experience the direct effects of being tear-gassed. This is a must read for anyone interested Hong Kong, China, democracy and human

In German law, a person strongly suspected of having committed a crime can be placed in pretrial detention; but a certain percentage of such people are ultimately acquitted. In this podcast, Dr. Jorg Kinzig, Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Tubingen, discusses his explorations of why this is. What do acquittals entail? Does Germany need a system and policy change? Dr. Kinzig speaks based on his paper “The Acquittal (After Pretrial Detention)—a Rare but Fascinating Phenomenon of the Criminal Justice System”, published in Brill’s European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law, and Criminal Justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence—or ignored altogether. In her book Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement: Baljit Kaur, who armed herself with a video camera to record essential evidence of the conflict; Justice Ajit Singh Bains, who became a beloved “people’s judge”; and Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who returned to Punjab to document abuses even as other elites were fleeing. Together, they are credited with saving countless lives. Braiding oral histories, personal snapshots, and primary documents recovered from at-risk archives, Kaur shows that when entire confli

As British colonial rulers expanded their control in South Asia legal resolutions were increasingly shaped by the English classification of social life. The definitional divide that structured the role of law in most cases was the line between what was deemed religious versus secular. In Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Julia Stephens, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, examines how Islam and Muslims were regulated within legal domains that managed various spheres of life. British rule determined that religious laws were most effective in governing family affairs but secular laws would govern markets and transactions. What complicated this simple binary was that Islamic “personal law” was very often bound up with economic issues. In our conversation we discuss British notions of “secular governance,” marriage and women’s property, the role of custom in legal reasoning, rulings around ritual and challenges

In Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India (Duke UP, 2016), Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Since 2001 activists have attempted to rewrite Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which in addition to outlawing homosexual behavior is often used to prosecute a range of activities and groups that are considered perverse. Having interviewed activists and NGO workers throughout five metropolitan centers, investigated crime statistics and case law, visited various state institutions, and met with the police, Puri found that Section 377 is but one element of how homosexuality is regulated in India. Through a cleverly conceptualized multi-sited ethnography and rigorous historical analysis, Puri masterfully shows how the hypervisibility of Section 377 has consequences for the ways in which sexuality, and the regulation of sexuality, i

Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as much as they have been a vehicle for liberation and expression, historian Lee Vinsel argues that automobiles have been shaped by government regulation through and through. In Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Vinsel combats the free market doctrine that auto regulation is fundamentally opposed to innovation. In part, he does this by historicizing the animus against regulation and the “innovation speak” that emerged in its wake. But the book itself makes a compelling argument for how the automobile has always been perceived by voluntary associations and governing bodies as a risk in need of taming. These shifting perceptions formed the basis for infrastructures that made the car into a more dependable, safer, and cleaner technology. Vinsel’s engaging narrative provides a model for s

Incivility in our public discourse is limiting our ability to get things done as a nation and preventing us from expressing ourselves in workplaces and classrooms for fear of offending those with real or imagined historical grievances or even merely strongly held views. If you agree with that, then Adam J. MacLeod’s book The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) is the book for you. Alternatively, if you think such fears are overblown and just a nefarious argument advanced by a self-serving elite to justify a return to establishment rule this is likewise the book for you. Why both audiences? Because this important volume is all about how to go about thinking and reasoning and the role morality plays in those processes. In his book, MacLeod argues that due to the decline in moral education young people he dubs “selfies” have entered academia and the workplace without moral cores and are so riven with narcissism and a sense of entitlement that they are

“Never again!” This was the rallying cry, seemingly universal and unanimous, among liberal nation-states as they formed the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and later signed the UN Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Emerging from the ashes of a global war that took some 60 million lives, and after witnessing the atrocities of Nazi Germany, a worldwide community appeared resolute in its commitment to not only condemn, but to also strive to prevent future “crimes against humanity.” In The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America (Oxford University Press, 2017), María Cristina García evaluates how the end of the Cold War brought new and unanticipated challenges to upholding this commitment from 1989 to the present. Through nine case studies that examine the central actors, debates, policies, and conflicts that have shaped the U.S. response to humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era, Dr. García explains the tensions that exist betwee

Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sitting down to watch the evening news. The Covid-19 crisis is, unfortunately, a new broad-based instance in the valuation of human life. And I do mean value: in terms of cash dollars. Ultimate Price covers the ways that companies, courts, nations, and individuals have come to put a price tag on individual existence. While the book was written prior to the current situation, it provides an excellent starting point to understand what we are observing as governments, companies, healthcare providers, and individuals make life-and-death decisions. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more