New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

Ethan Blue, "The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal" (U California Press, 2021) Dec 23, 2021

Show notes

The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal(University of California Press, 2021) details thehistory of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains.

The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment and deportation that the world has ever known. The Deportation Express is the first history of American deportation trains: a network of prison railroad cars repurposed by the Immigration Bureau to link jails, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses across the country and allow forced removal with terrifying efficiency. With this book, historian Ethan Blue uncovers the origins of the deportation train and finds the roots of the current moment, as immigrant restriction and mass deportation once again play critical and troubling roles in contemporary politics and legislation.

Ethan Blue is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Western Australia, and has published widely on the United States and Australian penal systems.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Seth Barrett Tillman, "What Oath (if any) did Jacob Henry take in 1809?: Deconstructing the Historical Myths" Dec 23, 2021

Show notes

Seth Barrett Tillman, an associate professor of law at Maynooth University in Ireland, has written two revisionist articles about an incident from 1809 in North Carolina. In November of that year Jacob Henry was re-elected to the lower house of the North Carolina legislature. A fellow legislator moved to have Henry’s seat declared vacant because Henry purportedly failed the state constitution’s religious test. The next day there was a debate and the motion failed, allowing Henry to keep his seat. This unusual event has been cited by historians for different reasons. Some historians have contended that Henry was the victim of antisemitism and the failure to oust him was a sign that religious toleration had increased in the new nation. Whereas others have contended that the fact Henry was challenged at all demonstrates the bigotry of those who supported the challenge to Henry being seated. Tillman contends that recently unearthed newspaper accounts suggest the complexity and potential motives for the events are far from uncertain. In this interview we discuss Tillman’s two recent articles on this event and what it portends for the historical profession’s reliance upon primary documents to understand the past.

Seth Barrett Tillman, A Religious Test in America?: The 1809 Motion to Vacate Jacob Henry’s North Carolina State Legislative Seat—A Re-Evaluation of the Primary Sources, 98(1) North Carolina Historical Review 1–41 (Jan. 2021).

Seth Barrett Tillman, What Oath (if any) did Jacob Henry take in 1809?: Deconstructing the Historical Myths, American J. of Legal Hist.(forth. circa Mar. 2022).

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Mark S. Berlin, "Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws Against International Crimes" (Oxford UP, 2020) Dec 23, 2021

Show notes

Political Scientist Mark Berlin’s new book, Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws Against International Crimes (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the process through which laws against international crimes are established and integrated into the legal regimes of nations. One of the initial questions Berlin hoped to answer with his work was why do countries choose to pass and implement laws about genocide and atrocities—noting that there was no clear tracing of patterns around the world when he first started his research. It becomes clear that there are two prongs to this question, in terms of the answers: how do countries establish and integrate these laws, and why do they choose to do so. Criminalizing Atrocity outlines the answers to these questions, explaining that either countries take up a wholesale reform of their criminal codes, and in the process integrate laws against genocide and atrocities, or countries pass and implement specific laws targeted to atrocities and genocide. Berlin’s research also indicates that the regime type or a regime’s propensity for war do not matter in terms of how these laws are passed and put into action.

While there has been codifications and work done in this realm of law for some time, much activity in this area followed World War II and the Nuremberg trials. Criminalizing Atrocity explores this postwar period, when experts in this realm were working to develop legal regimes to address genocide and atrocity crimes. While this postwar period brought some attention to these criminal codes, much more happened as the Cold War came to a conclusion and many countries integrated atrocity laws into their legal regimes. Berlin examines all of this through a multi-method approach, compiling extensive data on individual country’s legal regimes as part of the research, alongside interviews, archival work, and analysis of primary sources.

Criminalizing Atrocity will be of interest to a large cross section of scholars, including those who study international law, comparative politics, legal studies, genocide and war crimes, governmental reform, and historians.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Henry Redwood, "The Archival Politics of International Courts" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Dec 21, 2021

Show notes

The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, Henry Redwood argues in The Archival Politics of International Courts(Cambridge University Press, 2021), these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain.

Margot Tudor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, based in the Politics department.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Luke Glanville, "Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities" (Princeton UP, 2021) Dec 21, 2021

Show notes

The idea that states share a responsibility to shield people everywhere from atrocities is presently under threat. Despite some early twenty-first century successes, including the 2005 United Nations endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect, the project has been placed into jeopardy due to catastrophes in such places as Syria, Myanmar, and Yemen; resurgent nationalism; and growing global antagonism. In Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities (Princeton UP, 2021), Luke Glanville seeks to diagnose the current crisis in international protection by exploring its long and troubled history. With attention to ethics, law, and politics, he measures what possibilities remain for protecting people wherever they reside from atrocities, despite formidable challenges in the international arena.

With a focus on Western natural law and the European society of states, Glanville shows that the history of the shared responsibility to protect is marked by courageous efforts, as well as troubling ties to Western imperialism, evasion, and abuse. The project of safeguarding vulnerable populations can undoubtedly devolve into blame shifting and hypocrisy, but can also spark effective burden sharing among nations. Glanville considers how states should support this responsibility, whether it can be coherently codified in law, the extent to which states have embraced their responsibilities, and what might lead them to do so more reliably in the future.

Sharing Responsibility wrestles with how countries should care for imperiled people and how the ideal of the responsibility to protect might inspire just behavior in an imperfect and troubled world.

Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Michel Foucault, "Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980)" (U of Minnesota Press, 2021) Dec 20, 2021

Show notes

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980) (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, is a groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France's inhumane treatment of prisoners

Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970-71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.

These archival documents--public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions--trace the GIP's establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault's concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish.

Presenting the account of France's most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today.

Kevin Thompson is professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He is author of Hegel’s Theory of Normativity.

Perry Zurn is assistant professor of philosophy at American University. He is coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (Minnesota, 2020) and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Stephen Vines, "Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship" (Hurst, 2021) Dec 20, 2021

Show notes

What sequence of events led Hong Kong to lose its long-held status as a liberal enclave of China? What drove its population to rise up against its government and confront Beijing? And why did China’s rulers decide to effectively put an end to the freedoms guaranteed under the One-Country-Two-Systems arrangement by imposing in June 2020 a draconian National Security Law designed to eliminate any political opposition that has already led to hundreds of arrests?

In Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship (Hurst, 2021), the prominent Hong Kong journalist and broadcaster Stephen Vines offers a blow-by-blow account of the 2019-2020 protest movement. The books details the emergence of an increasingly assertive and defiant Hong Kong political identity, the collapse of trust in the Beijing-anointed government, the PRC’s increasingly hands-on assertion of its sovereignty over the territory, and the deteriorating relationship between the West and an overly confident but inwardly insecure Chinese state.

Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Warren E. Milteer, Jr., "Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South" (UNC Press, 2021) Dec 20, 2021

Show notes

We often focus on enslaved people of color but Dr. Warren E. Milteer Jr.’s Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South(UNC Press, 2021) directs our attention to the people of color who were free -- and the complex web of intersecting values that led to significant inconsistencies in how they were treated and the institutions they built for themselves. Although many white southerners prized the racial hierarchy, Milteer insists that they also recognized other forms of hierarchy such as “gender, wealth, reputation, occupation, and family connections.” Engaging how these other forms of hierarchy intersected with racial categorization creates a rich history of how free people of color in the South negotiated legal regimes, political ideas, and institutions to carve out as much freedom as possible. Rejecting laws and political rhetoric as the only evidence for discerning the viewpoints of everyday people, Beyond Slavery’s Shadows places everyday people in their wider political and social contexts by drawing from an impressive catalogue of sources. The book accounts for how diverse political and social attitudes could coexist while it provides a remarkable history of law, colonization, taxes, labor, immigration, and gender.

Dr. Warren E. Milteer, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is also the author of North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020).

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Jocelyn Hendrickson, "Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa" (Harvard UP, 2020) Dec 17, 2021

Show notes

In her landmark new book Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard UP, 2020), Jocelyn Hendrickson launches a searingly brilliant legal history centered on the question of how medieval and early modern Muslim jurists in Iberia and North Africa wrestled with various thorny questions of living under or migrating away from non-Muslim political sovereignty. This book combines meticulous social and political history with nimble and accessible readings of a vast range of sources from the Maliki School of law. What emerges from this exercise is a picture of the Maliki legal tradition in particular and Islamic law more broadly that is unavailable for predictable readings, enormously interesting, and deliciously complex. This lucid book should also be a delight to teach in various graduate and upper level under graduate courses.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Shamira Gelbman, "The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction" (Temple UP, 2021) Dec 16, 2021

Show notes

Historically, how have marginalized and minority groups pushed the boundaries of representative government to pass legislation that benefits them? Political Scientist Shamira Gelbman, the Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Wabash College, answers this question in her new book, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple UP, 2021). Gelbman examines the history of The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) throughout the 1950s and 60s, teasing out the individuals who engaged in lobbying, advocacy, training, and other capacities to push civil rights legislation forward while also helping to block segregationist and white supremacy advocacy in Congress. Gelbman’s case study of the LCCR uses archival and scholarly resources to paint a picture of the Civil Rights Movement’s policy achievements by evaluating the role of lobbying and coalitional building.

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Second Reconstruction begins by exploring what it takes to create coalitional groups and the uniqueness of the political climate of the 20th century. The arguments about coalitional interest groups are presented alongside the informative history of the LCCR and the policy achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. Gelbman uses interest group theory to explain many of the teachings from this case study. Coalitional groups can often function as a “weapon for the weak,” and Gelbman takes notice of both the benefits of interest group lobbying as well as the setbacks of in-fighting between lobbyists in a broad coalition like the LCCR. The work of structuring the coalition, of working through different goals and approaches, is key in understanding the complicated process for moving forward with civil rights policy creation and implementation. The LCCR was made up of a wide array of groups and members, including a diversity of religious organizations, labor unions, and a constellation of civil rights organizations. Gelbman showcases the LCCR as an organization that mobilized professional and grassroots lobbying by distinguishing commonalities among the members to develop broad-based supports for legislators to pursue civil rights legislation.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected