New Books In Law

Willem Bart de Lint's Blurring Intelligence Crime: A Critical Forensics (Springer, 2022) explores the conundrum that political fortune is dependent both on social order and big, constitutive crime. An act of outrageous harm depends on rules and protocols of crime scene discovery and forensic recovery, but political authorities review events for a social agenda, so that crime is designated according to the relative absence or presence of politics. In investigating this problem, the book introduces the concepts 'intelligence crime' and 'critical forensics.' It also reviews as an exemplar of this phenomenon 'apex crime, ' a watershed event involving government in the support of a contested political and social order and its primary opponent as the obvious offender, which is then subject to a confirmation bias. Chapters feature case study analysis of a selection of familiar, high profile crimes in which the motives and actions of security or intelligence actors are considered as blurred or smeared depending on th

From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new c

Approximately half the population menstruates for a large portion of their lives, but the law is mostly silent about the topic. Until recently, most people would have said that periods are private matters not to be discussed in public. But the last few years have seen a new willingness among advocates and allies of all ages to speak openly about periods. Slowly around the globe, people are recognizing the basic fundamental human right to address menstruation in a safe and affordable way, free of stigma, shame, or barriers to access. In Menstruation Matters: Challenging the Law’s Silence on Periods (NYU Press, 2022), Dr. Bridget Crawford and Dr. Emily Gold Waldman explore the role of law in this movement. They ask what the law currently says about menstruation (spoiler alert: not much) and provides a roadmap for legal reform that can move society closer to a world where no one is held back or disadvantaged by menstruation. The book examines these issues in a wide range of contexts, from schools to workplaces t

The last few years have brought to the fore the brilliant work of scientists as they worked to find a vaccine for Covid-19. But have you ever stopped to think about the role of biological materials in this and other science- and health-related research? In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Associate Professor Sonja van Wichelen to take a close look at the complex world of global health governance, with a particular focus on biotechnology and bioscience governance in Indonesia. They discuss the crucial role of biological materials exchange for scientific research, what rules govern their use, and the history of inequality that has underpinned scientific use of biological materials. Taking Indonesia’s recent efforts to gain leverage in the uneven space of the global bioeconomy, they explore how bioscience governance mechanisms can perpetuate, or sometimes help address, global power inequalities in the way biological material is used. About Sonja van Wichelen: Sonja van Wichelen is As

Dr. Adam Hanna’s Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland (Syracuse University Press, 2022) is a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island’s jurisdictions. Focusing on poets’ responses in their writing to such contentious legal issues as partition, censorship, paramilitarism, and the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights, this volume is the first in the growing field of law and literature to monograph exclusively on modern Ireland. Dr. Hanna unpacks the legal engagements of both major and non-canonical poets from every decade between the 1920s and the present day, including Rhoda Coghill, Austin Clarke, Paul Durcan, Elaine Feeney, Miriam Gamble, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Julie Morrissy, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and W. B. Yeats. Poetry from the time of independence onward has been shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Irish public has traditionally

In her new book, Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (Oxford UP, 2021) political scientist Lucia M. Rafanelli develops an ethical theory of global reform intervention, arguing that new theories are necessary as increasing global interconnection continues and expands around the world. Rafanelli classifies global reform intervention as any attempt to promote justice in a society other than one’s own. This loose definition means that there are several variations of these actions: the degree of control held by the interveners; how interveners interact with recipients; existing political institutions; the context surrounding the action, and the risks intervention poses to the recipients of that intervention. Promoting Justice Across Borders argues that there are components within these dimensions that pollute the moral permissibility of reform intervention. Once the malleability of these actions becomes evident, it also becomes clear that there are ethical ways to go about (and not

Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena. Leila Neti is an associate professor of English at Occide

The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program (NYU Press, 2022) is the first book to look at the impact of the H-4 dependent visa programs on women and men visa holders in Indian families in America. Comparing two distinct groups of Indian immigrant families -families of male high-tech workers and female nurses-Pallavi Banerjee reveals how visa policies that are legally gender and race neutral in fact have gendered and racialized ramifications for visa holders and their spouses. Drawing on interviews with fifty-five Indian couples, Banerjee highlights the experiences of high-skilled immigrants as they struggle to cope with visa laws, which forbid their spouses from working paid jobs. She examines how these unfair restrictions destabilize-if not completely dismantle-families, who often break under this marital, financial, and emotional stress. Banerjee shows us, through the eyes of immigrants themselves, how the visa process strips them of their rig

Carl Hart speaks with Kim about America’s punitive drug laws, and how we might change them for the better. He argues that we should legalize and regulate the sale of all drugs, in the same way we regulate the sale of alcohol, to improve the health, equity, and liberty of our society. Dr. Hart is a professor of behavioral neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. You can learn how his scientific research in Neuropsychopharmacology relates to the politics of human experience in his new book Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (Penguin Random House 2021). Image: Creative Commons Music used for promotional material: ‘A Better Tomorrow’ by astrofreq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #metoo Era (Southern Illinois UP, 2021), editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work of contributors in the fields of criminal justice and criminology, sociology, journalism, and communications. These chapters show #MeToo is not only a support network of victims’ voices and testimonies but also a revolutionary interrogation of policies, power imbalances, and ethical failures that resulted in decades-long cover-ups and institutions structured to ensure continued abuse. This book reveals #MeToo as so much more than a hashtag. Contributors discuss how #MeToo has altered the landscape of higher education; detail a political history of sexual abuse in the United States and the UK; discuss a recent grand jury report about religious institutions; and address the foster care and correctional systems. Hollywood instances are noted for their fear of retaliation among victims and continued accolades for alleged abusers. In sports, contributors examine the Jer

The COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and the US-China trade dispute have heightened interest in the geopolitics and security of modern ports. Ports are where contemporary societal dilemmas converge: the (de)regulation of international flows; the (in)visible impact of globalization; the perennial tension between trade and security; and the thin line between legitimate, illicit and illegal. Applying a multidisciplinary lens to the political economy of port security, Ports, Crime and Security: Governing and Policing Seaports in a Changing World (Bristol UP, 2021) presents a unique outlook on the social, economic and political factors that shape organized crime and governance. Advancing the research agenda, this text bridges the divide between global and local, and theory and practice. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about

The civil war in Yemen has going on since 2014. Noria al-Hossini, Communications Director of Mwatana for Human Rights, discusses the war and the numerous human right violations that have occurred and are occurring in it.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

With me on today’s show is Professor Elizabeth Anker, whose most recent book, Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022), works to understand how the idea of freedom, seemingly so fundamental to our understanding of the American experience, is often the very concept that allows for the brutal deprivation of the freedom of others. As she writes, “ugly freedom entails a dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom.” Today we will be discussing Professor Anker’s theory of ugly freedom in the context of our unending crisis of gun violence in the United States. This show’s topic feels as essential as any that I have offered thus far. I hope you will find something hopeful in our conversation. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a cele

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Studies podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Dr Francesca Lessa about her interesting new book The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America published in 2022 by the Yale University Press. Stories of transnational terror and justice illuminate the past and present of South America's struggles for human rights. Through the voices of survivors and witnesses, human rights activists, judicial actors, journalists, and historians, Francesca Lessa unravels the secrets of transnational repression masterminded by South American dictators between 1969 and 1981. Under Operation Condor, their violent and oppressive regimes kidnapped, tortured, and murdered hundreds of exiles, or forcibly returned them to the countries from which they had fled. South America became a zone of terror for those who were targeted, and of impunity for those who perpetuated the violence. Lessa shows how networks of justice seekers gradually materialized and effecti

In Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (Cambridge UP, 2020), Nathan A. Kurz charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, Jewish lawyers and advocacy groups in Western Europe and the United States had pioneered forms of international rights protection, tying the defense of Jews to norms and rules that aspired to curb the worst behavior of rapacious nation-states. In the wake of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, however, Jewish activists discovered they could no longer promote the same norms, laws, and innovations without fear they could soon apply to the Jewish state. Using previously unexamined sources, Nathan Kurz examines the transformation of Jewish internationalism from an effort to constrain the power of nation-states to one focused on cementing Israel's legitimacy and its status as a haven for refugees from across the Jewish diaspora. Am

Western analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the Somali people have embraced shari'a, commonly translated as Islamic law, in the struggle for national identity and human rights. Lawyers, community leaders, and activists throughout the Horn of Africa have invoked God to oppose colonialism, resist dictators, expel warlords, and to fight for gender equality - all critical steps on the path to the rule of law. Shari'a, Inshallah traces the most dramatic moments of legal change, political collapse, and reconstruction in Somalia and Somaliland. In Shari'a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics (Cambridge UP, 2021), Massoud upends the conventional account of secular legal progress and demonstrates instead how faith in a higher power guides people toward the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud is professor of politics and legal studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he directs the Legal Stu

Lori Allen’s A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2020) is a deep engagement with Palestinian political history through an examination of international commissions. Over twenty commissions established over the last century have investigated political violence and human rights violations in the context of Palestine and Palestinians’ rights, yet there has also been very little material change resulting from these commissions. These commissions, Allen argues, operate as technologies of liberal global governance and do not bring justice to Palestinians. However—as her archival and ethnographic research shows, in a deep exploration of three such commissions—Palestinians continue to demand rights and recognition, even in the face of limited outcomes. A History of False Hope therefore serves as an exploration of the characters, motivations, and politics involved in Palestinians’ efforts to assert their rights—and colonial authorities’ and international organizations’ response

Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947-2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers--a previously unseen trove--and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe: An American Story (W. W. Norton, 2021) presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with f

As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (NYU Press, 2022), Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Judah Schept is Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Format

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies.  Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and ot