New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

Keith Richotte Jr., “Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents,” (UNC Press, 2017) Nov 20, 2017

Show notes

In Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Turtle Mountain Tribal Court Associate Justice and UNC-Chapel Hill American Studies Assistant ProfessorKeith Richotte, Jr., offers a critical examination of one tribal nation’s decision to adopt a constitution.

In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce’s choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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Stephanie Hinnershitz, “A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South” (UNC Press, 2017) Nov 14, 2017

Show notes

In her recent book, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Stephanie Hinnershitz (Cleveland State University) examines the important but overlooked contributions of Asian Americans to civil rights activism in the U.S. South. Hinnershitz takes a thematic focus across the long 20th century to show how Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and South Asians contested discrimination in land ownership, education, sexual relations and marriage, and business entrepreneurship. From “self-Orientalizing” as non-colored people to invoking their privileges as foreign nationals or refugees, the strategies and arguments that Asian Americans employed in the long and uneven struggle for equality were as varied as they were creative. Hinnershitz uses a wide-ranging source base including legal opinions, newspapers, and oral histories to narrate heartbreaking losses as well as surprising victories, such as the injunction against Klan violence that Vietnamese fishermen won in Texas in 1981. A Different Shade of Justice will interest readers of 20th-century US history, legal history, southern history, and Asian American history.

Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.edu.

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Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017) Nov 13, 2017

Show notes

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied roles of women in relief efforts during the war, and “Army at Home”: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), which concerns the experiences of working class women in the north. She is also the principal editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia (2014).

Her latest book, and the subject of our discussion, is Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of an American Morality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality.

We discuss how crucial, and yet understudied, questions of sex and desire are to the Civil War era and how silence around them has affected the ways we talk about and regulate social relations today. Much of our conversation focuses on how a small group of men created new regulations around pornography, the constitution of which was always up for debate, to hold onto the political and social power that they felt to be threatened by men of a lower class or of a different race. Prominent among this group of regulators, and a leading face of the postwar anti-vice campaigns, was Anthony Comstock. After serving in a largely inactive regiment during the war, and feeling left out of the camaraderie generated by the sharing of pornography among his fellow soldiers, Comstock fashioned for himself a largely illusory legal fraternity of moral crusaders. For pornography was hardly the main issue for those who associated themselves with his cause. Geisberg writes and talks about how other men in power negotiated the place of newly freed slaves by tightening the regulatory role that marriage played in their “free” lives. Doctors jumped at the opportunity to regulate abortion and contraception as a way to further professionalize themselves after postwar advances in medicine. Both of these groups became part of an omnibus of social reform that affects the country to this day. As you will hear over the course of our conversation, the importance of Giesberg’s account is in showing the connections between these issues and how they come together in the Civil War. Sexual abuse was at the center of social systems, including slavery. But the legal articulations of sexual crimes after the war created more easily regulated vices that distracted attention aw...

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Sandra F. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas, “Unequal: How American Courts Undermine Discrimination Law” (Oxford University Press, 2017 Nov 06, 2017

Show notes

The recent spate of revelations about high-profile sexual predators who have been harassing and assaulting women, sometimes for decades, along with the #MeToo campaign, have drawn renewed attention to the pernicious problem of discrimination in the workplace. We speak about these issues with Suja Thomas, whose new book, with co-author Sandra Sperino, shows us how (male) judges have invented an entire body of jurisprudence to justify dismissing sexual harassment cases before they can even get to juries. Join us for this timely and provocative discussion about Unequal: How American Courts Undermine Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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 University Press, 2017).

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Claire Higgins, “Asylum by Boat: Origins of Australia’s Refugee Policy” (New South Press, 2017) Nov 03, 2017

Show notes

In her new book, Asylum by Boat: Origins of Australia’s Refugee Policy (New South Press, 2017), Claire Higgins, a Senior Research Associate at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales Law School, explores the origins of Australia’s refugee policy. She investigates the Australian government’s response to the arrival by boat, in the late 1970s, of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. Unlike today, however, while boat turn-backs and detention were considered, these policies were rejected.

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Free Speech and Free Thinking with Seana Shiffrin Oct 19, 2017

Show notes

Seana Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA. She defends the “thinker theory” of freedom of speech, which holds that a central reason for upholding a moral and legal system of free speech is that such a system is necessary for free thought and reflective action. This view is articulated in her book, Speech Matters:On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton 2014).

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.

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James Forman Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) Oct 17, 2017

Show notes

In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass incarceration and the carceral state are hot topics in law and criminology, as the American criminal justice system faces mounting criticism for imprisoning disproportionate numbers of minorities, especially blacks. But as James Forman Jr. lays out in this book, the war on crime that saw its origins in the 1970s found a great deal of support among African American citizens, community leaders, and politicians across America’s urban landscape. Locking Up Our Own tries to understand this phenomenon.

James Forman Jr. is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions race and class dimensions.

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Mairaj Syed, “Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law” (Oxford UP, 2017) Sep 19, 2017

Show notes

Within a few generations after the death of Muhammad Muslims developed complex legal and theological traditions that shaped the boundaries of what was deemed Islamic. In Coercion and Responsibility in Islam: A Study in Ethics and Law (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mairaj Syed, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, Davis, examines how the constraints of interpretive traditions were tested under questions of coercion. He demonstrates that very often theological and legal reasoning moves beyond our expectations and interpretive conclusions are contradictory within seemingly uniform schools. He shows how members of the Mu’tazila and Ashari schools of theology determine the legal and moral responsibility of individuals who have been pressured to say or do something under coercive conditions. He also explores Hanafi and Shafi’i legal definitions of coercion and the various types of reasoning principles for drawing what is licit. These conundrums are hashed out through hypothetical coerced speech acts, such as proclamations of divorce, sale transactions, or legal acknowledgement, and coerced harm, as in rape or homicide.

In our conversation we discuss moral agency, the formative period of legal and theological traditions, conventional presumptions about these legal and theological schools, how tradition works, interpretive ambiguity within schools of thought, various instances of coercion, wrestling with the vast amount of hadith literature, and the fashioning of interpretive norms.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Tracy A. Thomas, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law” (NYU Press, 2016) Sep 06, 2017

Show notes

In this podcast I talk with Tracy A. Thomas about her book Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (New York University Press, 2016). Professor Thomas is the John F. Seiberling Chair of Constitutional Law and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of Akron School of Law. She is also editor of the Gender and the Law Prof Blog.

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Carwyn Jones, “New Treaty, New Tradition: Reconciling New Zealand and Maori Law” (U. British Columbia Press, 2016) Sep 01, 2017

Show notes

In New Treaty, New Tradition: Reconciling New Zealand and Maori Law (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), Carwyn Jones, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, explores Māori law and legal traditions with an eye on how they ebb and flow with changing social, environmental, and political circumstances in New Zealand. From the Treaty of Waitangi to recent land claim resolutions, Jones argues that genuine reconciliation needs to take into account Indigenous traditions in the settlement process.

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