New Books In Law

Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas are the authors of Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests (University Press of Kansas, 2017). LaPira is associate professor of political science at James Madison University; Thomas is assistant professor of political science at University of Texas, Arlington. What is the consequence of the rapid spin of the revolving door in Washington? Once a rarity, today nearly half of members of Congress join a lobbying firm after their time on the Hill ends. In Revolving Door Lobbying, the authors show that they are not alone. Former aides join the ranks of lobbyists and generate massive amounts of revenue for lobbying and law firms. These patterns have changed the political economy of Washington politics. LaPira and Thomas mine a decade of new Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) data to show the way the rise of revolving door lobbying has made representation less equal and enhanced private influence. The host of this week̵

Before Transgender actors entered popular culture, and before the “T” was included in LGBT, Transgender activism was a small and marginalized movement. However, though courage and perseverance, Transgender rights began to enter the public consciousness. Drawing on her own life story, Riki Wilchin’s newest book TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Congress…and Won! (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017) traces the origins of the Transgender movement. From the backwoods of rural Michigan to the nation’s capital, the movement challenged not only conservative politicians and worldviews but also challenged the boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality within more progressive movements. How do Trans issues and concerns intersect with notions of masculinity and femininity? What was the relationship between the Trans movement and the Gay movement? How do movements transcend the local and become national? Wilchins offers answers to these (and many

To remember Patrick Henry for his defiant declaration “Give me liberty or give me death!” is to overlook a long career spent as an advocate for the rights of Americans, first as colonists and then as citizens. In Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2017), Jon Kukla describes the course of Henry’s eventful life and how he developed his views on individual rights and other matters. The son of Virginia planters, as a young man Henry turned to the law to earn his living. His arguments in the famous “Parson’s Cause” legal case foreshadowed his case for colonial rights during the Stamp Act crisis, which cemented his standing as one of the leading opponents of Britain’s efforts to impose taxes upon the colonies. Henry was at the forefront of Virginia’s move towards independence in 1775, and as its first elected governor he led the commonwealth during years of crisis and turmoil. This experience, as Kukla explains, helped define his opposition to rat

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment. In her riveting new book Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017), Sarah Eltantawi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion at Evergreen State College, offers a dazzlingly nuanced and lucid account of the past and present of the stoning punishment in Northern Nigeria. Effortlessly moving between pre-modern and contemporary archives and contexts, Eltantawi traces the shifting meanings and political projects that have been invested into the stoning punishment over time. Historically grounded, theoretically exciting, and lucidly composed, this book is sure to spark important conversations and debates in multiple fields. It will also make a wonderful text for undergraduate and graduate seminars for courses on Islam, Islamic Law, Gender and Sexuality, and on Islam in

William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how Americans in the early Republic viewed the sources of their rights, we need look no further than the mud at the bottom of Baltimore harbor. In the early nineteenth century, two men, John Barron, Jr. and John Craig, decided to buy a Baltimore wharf on credit. They were hoping to capitalize on rapidly-expanding commercial growth in city in the wake of the War of 1812. Instead, the city diverted water into the harbor, leaving Barron and Craig’s wharf silted up and the pair with a pile of debt. The men sued, and eventually their case was argued before the Supreme Court. The decision in Barron v. Baltimore, as William Davenport Mercer shows, marked a key development in the history of American constitutionalism. In arguing that the Bill of Rights (and thus, the Fifth Amendment) applied only at the Federal leve

This week on the podcast we have a true political science legend. David R. Mayhew is the author of such political science greats as Congress: The Electoral Connection, Divided We Govern, and Partisan Balance. He is the Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale University. In his recent book, Mayhew examines the job America’s most routinely disparaged branch of government has actually done? The Imprint of Congress (Yale University Press, 2017) gives a deep historical analysis of the U.S. Congress’s performance since the late eighteenth century. He tracks major policy challenges addressed by Congress. In the end, Mayhew argues that Congress has actually accomplished a lot and, in doing so, balanced the presidency in a surprising variety of ways. In the podcast, Mayhew also discusses our current debate on polarization and the early Trump administration.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that

Josh Chafetz‘s new book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers (Yale University Press, 2017), examines Congress as a branch and the powers of the legislature within the constitutional system. This book approaches the Legislative branch historically, constitutionally, politically, and structurally through the separation of powers. Chafetz situates Congress as one of three political branches of government, each deriving power from the public, the constitution, formal responsibilities (like the Senate’s role in confirmation, or Congress’s power of the purse), and also informal capacities. In analyzing Congress, Chafetz makes use of the schematic framework of hard and soft power, often used by scholars to analyze international relations, contextualizing the kinds of powers that Congress has and how those powers have been used over the history of the branch and continue to be used. Chafetz explains his thesis in regard to the separation of powers theor

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the history of the state’s constitutions since it was first incorporated into the United States in the 1840s. Yet, she concentrates on the reform efforts begun during World War II and culminating in a new constitution in 1968. Adkins reviews the political interests that pushed for a new constitution, from the League of Women Voters to the new residents in the emergent southern coasts of Florida in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the process of reforming a constitution that was rooted in the traditional rotten borough politics of 19th-century Florida. She analyzes the impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that forced states to reapportion their legislatures, contending that Florida’s districts were so malapportioned that without the Court’s decis

Ryan Alford is a law professor at Lakehead University and a specialist in constitutional law. His book Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of Rule of Law (McGill Queens University Press, 2017), offers a fresh perspective on debates about the expansion of executive authority in the US in the post-9/11 period and has become even more topical in light of President Trump and the power he seeks to exercise. Drawing on a broader canvas of legal history and comparative law than is common in the field, Alford sketches a global standard of what constitutes a “rule of law state,” and applies this to make clear the extent to which Presidential power has departed from historical norms, amounting in essence to an “elective dictatorship.” Among the many novel facets of Alford’s study are the lines it traces between strategies of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations and those attempted by Nixon. Offering a powerful argument for why recent presidents have

The U.S. population is aging and we often rely on our family to care for us during our twilight years. But, families today can be quite complex, with divorce, step-families, and cohabitation changing the roles that family members are used to playing. In their new book, Homeward Bound: Modern Families, Elder Care, and Loss (Oxford University Press, 2017), Amy Ziettlow and Naomi Cahn interview families caring for a parent at the end of life and write about how these new norms and obligations are navigated in modern families. The book addresses many issues that become apparent at the end of life: family roles, financial as well as time costs, in addition to the planning (or lack thereof) for decisions that need to be made at the end of life for the parent. After the parent passes away, roles, once again, must be negotiated in families in addition to negotiations around wealth transfers and mourning. This book would be a good addition to an upper level Sociology course on families or death and dying as the storie

What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial societies? Join us as we speak with David Garland, author of The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016) , a whirlwind tour of the welfare state, past and present. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susanna L. Blumenthal is a professor of law and associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Blumenthal offers a historical examination of the jurisprudence of insanity, legal capacity, and accountability from post-revolutionary America through the nineteenth century. Americans struggling to set the boundaries of ordered liberty turned to Common Sense philosophy that held to divinely given rational faculties of intellect, volition, and moral sense. Republican citizenship assumed that a reasonable man, as a legal person, would act accordingly. The market economy of self-made men, the new field of medical psychology, will and contract challenges over wealth and property, tort law and increased liability claims exposed the inadequacy of social and political norms in defining human fallibility,

John Hudak‘s book Marijuana: A Short History (Brookings Institutions Press, 2016) is an accessible and informative dive into marijuana on a number of levels and from a variety of perspectives. Hudak unpacks and explains the historical place of marijuana in the United States, and the way that marijuana is situated within the criminal justice system, and how it is understood within our cultural vernacular and moral perspectives of what is right and wrong, legal and illegal. As marijuana now seems to be on a journey towards decriminalization or legalization in a number of states in the U.S., Hudak explores the way in which marijuana became an illegal substance, and how it is connected to the demonization of others–most specifically Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and the American counter-culture of earlier decades. The history of marijuana is fascinating because it highlights the evolution of various forms of regulation in the United States; and, as marijuanas classification in some s

Rwanda’s homegrown gacaca law has been widely hailed as a successful indigenous solution to the unprecedented problem of the country’s 1994 genocide. In his book Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), Bert Ingelaere complicates this received wisdom by focusing on the way the post-genocide gacaca trials unfolded, rather than on their lofty goals, as framed by the public relations arm of the post-genocide Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government and other interested parties, both internal and external to Rwanda. The Kinyarwandan word gacaca, derived from the word umucaca, originally referred to a plant that was so soft to sit on that people preferred to gather on it during precolonial times to adjudicate disputes and crimes, but most importantly, to restore social order and harmony. During the colonial period, the jurisdiction and prevalence of gacaca was greatly restricted. Its re-emergence as a viable means of transitional justice

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, began researching the book that became Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017) by wondering whether Jim Crow laws in the U.S. had any impact on the development of the Nuremberg Laws. Some scholars have denied any influence. Professor Whitman came to a very different conclusion, and what he learned deserves to be much more widely appreciated than it is. For the United States was the global pioneer of explicitly racist law–and not just, by any means, in the Jim Crow South. Strikingly, American law was most helpful to the most radical Nazi jurists. In the early years of the Third Reich, 1933 to 1936, conservative nationalist lawyers in Germany debated with Nazi radicals about how to create a body of anti-Semitic law, but one consonant with German legal traditions, which emphasized strict adherence to carefully-articulated concepts. The ra

The ‘ideological odd couple’ of Robert George and Cornel West jointly authored a statement defending free speech on campus and elsewhere. Find out why. Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and the founding director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His research focuses on issues in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Brandon Kendhammer takes a fresh approach to the juxtaposition of Islam and democracy in his latest book, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Rather than employing a top-down approach to understanding Islam’s compatibility with democracy, Kendhammer chose to speak with blue-collar, working-class Muslims in cities across Northern Nigeria. Through this approach, Kendhammer exposes the pragmatic views of ordinary citizens more concerned with economic stability than jihadist rhetoric. As the political situation gets more violent and the idea of democracy more remote in Nigeria, Kenhammer offers a viewpoint of deep understanding for the complex situation. Based upon hundreds of conversations with ordinary citizens, he sketches a picture of how Islam and democracy can, and often is, reconciled in the neighborhoods and marketplaces of urban Nigeria’s centers, where Christians and Muslims live side-by-side. It is in the daily

Seth Barrett Tillman has written “Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History and Scholarship,” an article about the famous case that is popularly thought to demonstrate a conflict between the President and the federal courts during the American Civil War. Tillman’s article is an effort to revise the standard historical understanding of the case called Ex Parte Merryman. In the spring of 1861, just as the hostilities had begun in the Civil War, famously issued an order to the U.S. Army granting army officials discretion to suspend the writ of habeas corpus if resistance or treasonous activity were encountered in Union territory. That spring, as soldiers poured into the Washington, D.C. area through Maryland, the Army was confronted with popular protests and violence by civilians. One suspect was John Merryman, a young man from a prominent Maryland family. Merryman hired lawyers to seek his release via the traditional method of asking the federal courts for an order to release Merryman pending his trial

This week’s podcast is a fraud or at least about a fraud. Edward J. Balleisen has written Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, 2017). Balleisen is associate professor of history and public policy and vice provost of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. Why is fraud committed so frequently in the United States? What about our political and legal institutions has created such an inviting environment for tricksters? And, what has government done to address it? In Fraud, Balleisen surveys centuries of American political, legal, and business history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices