New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

Katherine Eva Maich, "Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights" (Stanford UP, 2025) Sep 15, 2025

Show notes

The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging.

In Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Dr. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Julien Mailland on "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" Sep 15, 2025

Show notes

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Julien Mailland, Associate Professor of Media Management, Law, and Policy at The Media School of Indiana University Bloomington, about his book, The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry. The book examines key moments, beginning in the 1970s, in which legal decisions influenced how the videogame industry worked, how law shaped business and technology strategy and vice versa. The conversation touches on the book’s three major themes: intellectual property, freedom of speech, and international law. The pair also discuss Mailland’s new project, a geopolitical history of the best-selling videogame of all time, Tetris.

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Rose Casey, "Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style" (Fordham UP, 2025) Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine.

Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.
Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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Maria R. Montalvo, "Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024) Sep 09, 2025

Show notes

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States.

It is extraordinarily difficult for historians to reconstruct the lives of individual enslaved people. Records--where they exist--are often fragmentary, biased, or untrue. In Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Maria R. Montalvo investigates the legal records, including contracts and court records, that American antebellum enslavers produced and preserved to illuminate enslavers' capitalistic motivations for shaping the histories of enslaved people. The documentary archive was not simply a by-product of the business of slavery, but also a necessary tool that enslavers used to exploit the people they enslaved.

Building on Montalvo's analysis of more than 18,000 sets of court records, Enslaved Archives is a close study of what we can and cannot learn about enslaved individuals from the written record. By examining five lawsuits in Louisiana, Montalvo deconstructs enslavers' cases--the legal arguments and rhetorical strategies they used to produce information and shape perceptions of enslaved people. Commodifying enslaved people was not simply a matter of effectively exploiting their labor. Enslavers also needed to control information about those people. Enslavers' narratives--carefully manipulated, prone to omissions, and sometimes false--often survive as the only account of an enslaved individual's life.

In working to historicize the people at the center of enslavers' manipulations, Montalvo outlines the possibilities and limits of the archive, providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary consequences of commodification. Enslaved Archives makes a significant intervention in the history of enslaved people, legal history, and the history of slavery and capitalism by adding a qualitative dimension to the analysis of how enslavers created and maintained power.

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Karen Bartlett, "Escape from Kabul: The Afghan Women Judges Who Fled the Taliban and Those They Left Behind" (New Press, 2025) Sep 05, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025).

The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country. Their work, however, posed an existential threat to everything the Taliban believed in. When the United States withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan faced mortal danger.

Journalist Karen Bartlett goes beyond their escape, and talks about the Afghan women judges’ backgrounds, the cases they were tie breakers on, and the importance of the international network of women judges who helped them evacuate in 2021.

Bartlett critiques the abandonment of Afghanistan by the West, and warns people not to normalise or be complacent to the Taliban regime which is still strongly opposed within the country. She also calls for the international community to take accountability for women judges who are still left in limbo or trapped in Afghanistan.

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Brendan A. Shanahan, "Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1965" (Oxford UP, 2025) Sep 01, 2025

Show notes

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure.
Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women.

Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States.

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) Aug 31, 2025

Show notes

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.

She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites.

Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public.

Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

Susan Liebellis associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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David Bosco, "The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World's Oceans" (Oxford UP, 2021) Aug 30, 2025

Show notes

Oceanic Studies. An interdisciplinary podcast that examines the past, present, and future of ocean governance

In 1609, the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius rejected the idea that even powerful rulers could own the oceans. "A ship sailing through the sea," he wrote, "leaves behind it no more legal right than it does a track." A philosophical and legal battle ensued, but Grotius's view ultimately prevailed. To this day, "freedom of the seas" remains an important legal principle and a powerful rhetorical tool.
Yet in recent decades, freedom of the seas has eroded in multiple ways and for a variety of reasons. During the world wars of the 20th century, combatants imposed unprecedented restrictions on maritime commerce, leaving international rules in tatters. National governments have steadily expanded their reach into the oceans. More recently, environmental concerns have led to new international restrictions on high seas fishing. Today's most dangerous maritime disputes-including China's push for control of the South China Sea-are occurring against the backdrop of major changes in the way the world treats the oceans.

As David Bosco shows in The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World's Oceans (Oxford UP, 2021), the history of humanity's attempt to create rules for the oceans is alive and relevant. Tracing the roots of the law of the sea and the background to current maritime disputes, he shows that building effective ocean rules while preserving maritime freedoms remains a daunting task. Bosco analyzes how fragile international institutions and determined activists are struggling for relevance in a world still dominated by national governments. As maritime tensions develop, The Poseidon Project will serve as an essential guide to the continuing challenge of ocean governance.

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Yong-Shik Lee, "Law and Development: Theory and Practice, 2nd edition" (Routledge, 2021) Aug 30, 2025

Show notes

Law and Development: Theory and Practice, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2021) examines the theory and practice of law and development. It introduces the General Theory of Law and Development, an innovative approach which explains the mechanisms by which law impacts development. This book analyzes the process of economic development in South Korea, South Africa, and the United States from legal and institutional perspectives. The book also explains why the concept of "development" is not only relevant to developing countries but to developed economies as well.

The new edition includes five new chapters addressing the relationships between law and economic development in several key areas, including property rights, political governance, business transactions, state industrial promotion, and international trade and development.

This interview covers the main themes of this book, covers some of his papers, the relationship of his work to other scholars, and serves as a foundation for understanding Dr. Lee’s work more broadly. His latest book, Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia will be the subject of a second interview.

Yong-Shik Lee is a scholar in law and development, and is currently Director of the Law and Development Institute and a Professor at West Virginia University. Dr. Lee graduated in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and received law degrees from the University of Cambridge. Previous books include Reclaiming Development in the World Trading System; Microtrade: A New System of Trade Toward Poverty Elimination; Law and Development Perspective on International Trade Law; and Safeguard Measures in World Trade: The Legal Analysis. His latest book, Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia, was published by Anthem Press.

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Lindsey N. Kingston, "Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019) Aug 28, 2025

Show notes

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford UP, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is applied and understood, and where there are clear gaps in that application. This is a wide-ranging, rigorously researched examination of citizenship, statelessness, and human movement. And it is vitally relevant to contemporary discussions of immigration, supranationalism, understandings of national borders, and concepts of belonging. Not only does Kingston delve into theoretical concepts of citizenship and statelessness, she also integrates analyses of various kinds of hierarchies of personhood in context of these broader issues. The research also includes explorations of nomadic people, indigenous nations, and "second class" citizens in the United States within this theoretical framework of citizenship and statelessness. This careful and broad analysis defines the novel idea of ‘functional citizenship’, which is both theoretical and practical in considering citizenship and statelessness in our modern world. Fully Human focuses on the promises and protections that are outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unpacking the protection gaps and difficulties that have become clearer and more acute in this era of globalization and security concerns, and highlighting some of the key problems with the current human rights regimes that are in place.

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