New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

Ron Fein, “The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump” (Melville House, 2018) Aug 15, 2018

Show notes

Is there a case for the impeachment of Donald Trump? Constitutional attorney Ron Fein says not only is there a case, but also that the case exists regardless of what happens with the special counsel investigation. The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump (Melville House, 2018), co-authored by Fein and two of his legal colleagues at Free Speech for People, articulates the grounds for at least eight articles of impeachment, most of which are unrelated to the allegations of a election conspiracy with Russian officials. They argue Trump has violated the Constitution by accepting payments from foreign governments through his Washington, DC hotel, using government agencies to pushing political enemies, undermining a free press and abusing the power to pardon. The book argues that political considerations for 2018 and 2020 should be set aside, and that the impeachment process should begin immediately strictly on constitutional grounds.

Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.

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Thomas Mulligan, “Justice and the Meritocratic State” (Routledge Press, 2018) Aug 13, 2018

Show notes

Thomas Mulligan’s new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State (Routledge Press, 2018), posits a theory of justice that is based on the allocation of valuable goods (jobs and appropriate income) according to merit. This is an abstract concept that Mulligan details according to economic, philosophical, and political understandings. He weaves together the political and economic dimensions of meritocratic allocations and spends the latter part of the book noting policy ideas that can bring this abstract concept into being. In the process, Mulligan critiques contemporary concepts of justice, especially commenting on the 20th-century work by Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Leo Strauss, and post-modern philosophers. The argument made for meritocratic allocation of valuable goods is seen as a kind of third way between the limited nature of egalitarian theory on one side and libertarian theory on the other. The argument for “desert”-based justice also brings the ideal of the American dream into clearer focus in Mulligan’s analysis. His book explores this concept in great detail, clearing up what has been the murky nature of an understanding of what meritocracy really means. Throughout the book, Mulligan delves into concepts of meritocracy from classical authors like Socrates/Plato and Aristotle, as well as from eastern approaches. He explores the integration of an understanding of meritocratic governance and political power from Confucian political theory as well as from much of the western philosophical canon. This book spans a variety of disciplines, and may be of interest to political theorists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, and others. It is clearly written and takes the reader through not only the concept of meritocracy and desert-based justice, but also the role of economics in understanding justice, and, finally, the kinds of policy and rhetorical shifts that are necessary to more fully establish a meritocratic state.

This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj

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Heather Schoenfeld, “Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration” (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018) “answers how the United States became a nation of prisons and prisoners” (p. 5). Schoenfeld exposes the reader to the historical development of prisons and policy development. She focuses specifically on Florida as a case study to show how prisons become racialized social systems. Interestingly, much of the crime control we have today grew out of racialized punishments and unrest shaped during the civil rights era. Bringing us all the way up to 2016, Schoenfeld sheds light on how prisons developed over time, even as crime rates have fallen. Often incentivized as a source of economic potential in rural areas, prisons have a unique history in the U.S. and this book uncovers that fascinating history.

This book will be of interest to Sociologists and Criminologists, but also Political Scientists and social activists. Sections of the book could be used in an undergraduate Criminology course or a course specifically focused on race and crime. This text would also be critically important to have in a graduate level Criminology course.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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Allan Greer, “Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Aug 06, 2018

Show notes

In his Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Allan Greer, Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University in Montréal, examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of ‘property formation’ to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent’s resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book’s geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses, such as Native American Cultures and History in North America, at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.

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Katherine Benton-Cohen, “Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy” (Harvard UP, 2018) Jul 30, 2018

Show notes

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later.

Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard University Press, 2018) describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics.

The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.

Katherine Benton-Cohen is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University.

Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement.

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Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2018) Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), is filled with sophisticated arguments and compelling stories. It explores how privacy first burst into political debate and cultural anxieties in the late nineteenth-century and how Americans ever since have navigated the moving line between the private and the public.

She traces how new technologies (e.g. instant cameras), new practices (e.g. journalistic focus on the personal), new forms of knowledge (e.g. psychology), and new book genres (e.g. the tell-all memoir) spurred debates about privacy in the United States. Most critically, she shows how claims to privacy—made by gay Americans, the poor, and other marginalized groups—were also assertions of citizenship. Who gets privacy, and how much of it—and their counterpart, who gets to know what—were questions of politics as much as culture.

Igo’s book is a welcome contribution to understanding the longer history of privacy—especially welcome in our own age of social media and mass surveillance. The book should be read by cultural historians, intellectual historians, media studies scholars, historians of the state, and scholars interested in material culture.

Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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William Kuby, “Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 16, 2018

Show notes

William Kuby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His book, Conjugal Misconduct: Defying Marriage Law in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines the complicated legal and cultural history of heterosexual marriage. Long before the controversy over same-sex marriage, Americans found multiple ways to object to certain heterosexual marriages and divorce. The commercialization of courtship through advertisements and marriage bureaus, trial and common law marriages, rising divorce and remarriage rates, interracial coupling, and onerous waiting periods and requirements created a marriage crisis in law. It also created a crisis in social policy and norms as people experimented with unconventional unions and attempted to redefine gender roles and expectations. The marriage market was rife with unrealized expectations. Often the attention from conservative critics and journalists was greater than any real threat to marriage and the family. Kuby has shown us how marriage has been an area of legal contest and the how it continually generated anxiety about the foundations of society.

This episode of New Books in Gender 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. She is the author of The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Stephen C. Yeazell, “Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation” (U Chicago Press, 2018) Jul 10, 2018

Show notes

Stephen C. Yeazell‘s Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an in-depth look at the development and current situation of civil litigation. It beings with the question of why civil lawsuits have become such a political question and uses that to explore our world of settlements, arbitration, trials and insurance adjusting. It gives an expert, informed and even-handed look at what can be a contentious topic and is accessible to the layperson and edifying even to the professional. It portrays our environment of civil litigation as an evolving one where real people solve real problems, often for society’s benefit.

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Linda Ross Meyer, “Sentencing in Time” (Amherst College Press, 2017) Jul 03, 2018

Show notes

If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) physical violence—whipping, beating, branding, amputation, and killing—to one that uses confinement. It is a mark of our “civility” that we no longer “hurt” people to get them to do what we want; instead, we put them in jails and prisons. We sentence them to “do time,” that time being a period of confinement away from, well, pretty much everybody.

In her thought-provoking book Sentencing in Time (Amherst College Press, 2017), Linda Ross Meyer examines “doing time.” What, she asks, does it really mean to “do time” and does “doing time” really do what we say it does? Her answers are, to say the least, disturbing. “Doing time” means being sentenced to meaninglessness (something humans don’t like at all) and, no, it really doesn’t do much good at all beyond removing potential malefactors from our midst for a period of time—no “reforming” is really accomplished. Her conclusion: the current penal regime, insofar as it is inhumane and ineffective, is badly broken.

By the way, this is an open-access book. You can get it for free here.

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Martha S. Jones, “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 02, 2018

Show notes

The contemporary moment has brought to the forefront the question of what constitutes an American citizen. The legal question in popular understanding stems from the Fourteenth Amendment and its use of birthright citizenship as a central identifier of what makes a citizen. In Dr. Martha S. Jones’ newest book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) skillfully demonstrates that by the time the amendment was passed, Black Baltimoreans had already personally conceived of themselves as birthright citizens because of their lived experiences in the antebellum era. By using the country’s largest free Black population as a proxy to discuss the performance of citizenship by Black Baltimoreans, Dr. Jones re-conceptualizes our understanding of what the politics of belonging meant for this very important antebellum Black community.

Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.

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