New Books in Law

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Mary Fulbrook, “Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice” (Oxford UP, 2018) Sep 27, 2018

Show notes

What voices have been silenced in the history of the Holocaust? How did victims and perpetrators make sense of their experiences? How did the failed pursuit of post-war justice shape public memory? In her new book Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), Mary Fulbrook uses diaries, memoirs, and trials to recover the full spectrum of suffering and guilt. By exposing the disconnect between official myths and unspoken realities of post-war justice, Mary illuminates the changing public attitudes to perpetrators and survivors.

Mary Fulbrook is a Professor of German History at University College London. Her numerous books cover modern Germany, its two dictatorships, the Holocaust, and questions of historical interpretation. She currently directs the AHRC Compromised Identities project on the character and personal legacies of perpetration and complicity. Fulbrook is also a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the former concentration camps Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora as well as the Editorial Boards of German Politics and Society and Zeithistorische Forschungen.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

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Svetlana Stephenson, “Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power” (Cornell University Press, 2015) Sep 26, 2018

Show notes

The title of Svetlana Stephenson’s book Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power (Cornell UP, 2015) invites a number of questions: How do criminal and legal spheres conflate? Is the cooperation of criminal organizations and legal institutions inherent to a society structure? In what way do gangs shape society, and vice versa? And what model of the societal structure does the Russian case offer? Far from being exhaustive, these issues receive a thorough investigation in Svetlana Stephenson’s attempt to analyze Russian gangs from the perspective of a social form. As the scholar asserts, “Russian gangs are not alien to society: they are firmly embedded in it” (9). Gangs do not constitute separate worlds, although they may seem closed and isolated: gangs signal individual’s aspirations and ambitions and, to a large extent, societal challenges. Gangs of Russia traces the development of Russian criminal organizations, ranging from early Soviet years to the present-day Russia. Including data and information that was received in the course of interviewing current and/or former gang members of different, so to speak, “ranks,” Svetlana Stephenson locates the gang as a social form in the continuum of sociology, history, politics, and culture. On the one hand, the Russian gang is presented as a successor of Soviet criminal organizations and, on the other hand, it is presented as an establishment that pioneers and propels new modes of criminal behavior and new ways of collaboration with legal institutions. This research also includes and further invites comparative perspectives on the nature of the criminal gang: insights into Russian gangs are supplemented with fine observations with regard to the Italian mafia and the American criminal world. While being a compelling read for those who are interested in sociology, Gangs of Russia also provides a fascinating cultural twist.

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Sarah E. Holcombe, “Remote Freedoms: Politics, Personhood and Human Rights in Aboriginal Central Australia” (Stanford UP, 2018) Sep 26, 2018

Show notes

In her new book, Remote Freedoms: Politics, Personhood and Human Rights in Aboriginal Central Australia (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah E. Holcombe, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, explores how universal human rights, codified 70 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, get translated, practiced, and challenged in the context of Indigenous rights. Through her field research with Anangu of Central Australia, she shows the paradoxical, double-edged nature of human rights for Aboriginal people and considers alternative ways of thinking about human dignity.

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Ken Ilguas, “This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back” (Plume, 2018) Sep 25, 2018

Show notes

Author, journalist and sometime park ranger Ken Ilgunas has written an argument in favor a “right to roam.” This concept, unfamiliar to most Americans, is one of an ability to traverse public and private property for purposes of enjoying nature. In This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back (Plume, 2018), Ilgunas compares U.S. property laws with the traditions and laws of England, Scotland and Scandinavian countries. In these nations a right to roam has been recognized and, Ilgunas argues, has been a boon to citizens’ enjoyment of their nations’ lands, while also protecting the property rights of private owners. Ilgunas addresses owners’ concerns about the use and enjoyment of their land and makes the case that a “right to roam” would be beneficial to owners and members of the public alike. Yet, Ilgunas also acknowledges the obstacles to creating such a right in the United States: popular understandings of the sacredness of private property, fears of lawsuits, the existence of public lands as alternative venues, and the federal and state systems of land management. Ilgunas also concedes that a “right to roam” is not merely a legal problem but a problem regarding long-held perceptions of the moral rightness of private property and the ability to exclude others from using one’s land.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Jonathan W. White, “Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life” (Cumberland House, 2015) Sep 13, 2018

Show notes

Jonathan W. White, an associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, is the author of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life (Cumberland House, 2015). In this work White reveals the moral character of Abraham Lincoln through his law practice. Lincoln was a lawyer on the American frontier in Illinois, representing clients ranging from individuals in divorces and railroads in contract disputes. Throughout his career he rendered advice, not only to clients but to prospective young lawyers and friends. Lincoln’s experience as a lawyer is both revealing about the norms of law practice in the antebellum period and about the formation of Lincoln’s approach to law and governance, which would influence his behavior as President during the Civil War. White has an eye for entertaining and revealing anecdotes. In revealing how Lincoln practiced law White helps uncover Lincoln as a person, beyond the reverential historical figure we all know from America’s Civil War.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Lev Weitz, “Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Sep 04, 2018

Show notes

Recent years have seen new waves of research in Syriac studies, the medieval Middle East, and family history. Combining all three, Lev Weitz’s Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), revisits the early years of Islamic civilization by looking at an oft-neglected population in the secondary literature, Syriac Christians. Weitz’s study uses marital practice from the seventh through tenth centuries to illustrate how Islamic law influenced the development of Christian law and the role religious authorities –that is the Christian bishops– had to play in it. We talk through polygamy, confessional boundaries, and what households meant now and then; Weitz also fills us in on what the growing field of Syriac studies looks like, how it is changing, and how a scholar of the medieval Middle East gets their sources.

Lev Weitz is an historian of the Islamic Middle East. He is an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, in the Department of History; he also directs the Islamic World Studies program at Catholic University. For academic year 2018-19, he will be a fellow of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He did his PhD at Princeton University at the Department of Near Easter Studies. His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Samuel Moyn, “Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World” (Harvard UP, 2018) Sep 04, 2018

Show notes

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia traced the evolution of the human rights revolution and argued that human rights as an ideology took the place of socialism and other utopian ideologies that failed. In his new book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2018), Moyn examines human rights from a different perspective, namely its inability to challenge the rise of inequality across the world. Moyn argues that this development wasn’t inevitable from a historical perspective and was the result of decisions made by politicians and social priorities articulated by philosophers beginning in the twentieth century. As a consequence, human rights has coexisted alongside inequality, unable to meaningfully critique it.

Moyn begins by looking at the French Revolution, which he asserts was the first government that explicitly thought in egalitarian terms for its citizens. Noting that the welfare state was ironically a project of right-wing nationalist governments, Moyn argues that the postwar welfare states nevertheless embraced egalitarian impulses that not only established protections for their citizens but established ceilings on the kinds of wealth that that they could enjoy. In the Global South, newly independent states also embraced ideologies that would do the same. However, development economists instead emphasized poverty reduction campaigns that sought to provide marginal protections for the indigent without limiting the growth of wealth; this was matched by philosophers who reflected this same concern. The result was a human rights revolution focused more on subsistence and protections for the worst off that never tried to fight rising inequality.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Sarah E. Igo, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2018) Aug 28, 2018

Show notes

Sarah E. Igo is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Igo provides a legal and social history of the idea of privacy and how it was first evoked, challenged, written into law and reinterpreted by ordinary citizens in the age of mass marketing and social media. Once the right of elite citizens to protect their reputations, the growth of the bureaucratic state, communications technologies, and the inquiries of experts brought the issue of privacy into view for many more Americans. First defined by legal experts as the “right to be left alone” in bodily, mental and emotional aspects, by the end of the twentieth century privacy came to mean the right to control one’s public narrative. Americans have swung from seeking seclusion in increasingly secure homes to tell-all public confessions, reflecting a dilemma between the desire to left alone and the need to be known. Igo has shed light on why Americans are so conflicted about privacy, navigating the treacherous terrain of the state, the market and their own desire for connection, security, and visibility.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, Oxford University Press, 2018.

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Philip Thai, “China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842-1965” (Columbia UP, 2018) Aug 21, 2018

Show notes

From petty runs to organized trafficking, the illicit activity of smuggling on the China coast was inherently dramatic, but now historian Philip Thai has also identified China’s history of smuggling as a significant narrative about the expansion of state power. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842-1965 (Columbia University Press, 2018) spans multiple regimes from the late Qing dynasty to the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Thai notes that regimes tightened regulations, increased tariffs, and enforced laws more harshly as part of the project to consolidate authority and meet challenges posed by foreign powers. The smuggling epidemic put constraints on consumption that remade daily life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Their resistance threatened the state’s power while at the same time encouraging state intervention that increased the reach of the state and its authority. Drawing from a rich array of sources including customs records, legal cases, press reports, and popular literature, Thai provides a fresh, insightful take on the development of the modern state during a period of dramatic change and challenges. China’s War on Smuggling will appeal to those interested in the history of commerce, law, and criminology in modern China.

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Gary Fields, “Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror” (U California Press, 2017) Aug 16, 2018

Show notes

Inspired by the usage of the term ‘enclosure’ to describe the Separation Wall in Israel-Palestine on a visit he made to the West Bank, Gary Fields in Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (University of California Press, 2017) draws upon the past to speak to the Palestinian present and explain Palestinian dispossession. We talk through why Fields thinks it is necessary to use a long lens to think about the discourses framing the conflict in Israel/Palestine, specifically the English enclosures, which changed the nature of access to common land across the English countryside and Amerindian dispossession in colonial America. As land, discourse, and people themselves shape the practice of enclosure, we hone in on the politics of writing about Palestine and Palestinians, as well as how Fields’ other work fits into his academic work. Enclosure is on the short-list for the Palestine Book Award for the 2018 year.

Gary Fields is professor of communication at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in City and Regional Planning. He often uses photo and film to explore his research interests and writes widely beyond the academy.

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