New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

Srimati Basu, “The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India” (U of California Press, 2015) Jun 13, 2016

Show notes

Are solutions to marital problems always best solved through legal means? Should alternative dispute resolutions be celebrated? In her latest book The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India (University of California Press, 2015) Srimati Basu answers such questions and many more through explorations of ‘lawyer free’ courts and questions surrounding understandings of domestic violence, analyses of the way rape intersects with marriage and how kinship systems change with legal disputes and by delineating the most important acts that frame marriage law in India. Theoretically and politically astute the book offers an ethnographic insight into legal sites of marriage trouble in India.

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Bernard Harcourt, “Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age” (Harvard UP, 2015) May 17, 2016

Show notes

The landscape described in Bernard Harcourt‘s new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance.

Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual.

Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal.

According to Exposed, are appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit.

John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at nudgeblog@gmail.com.

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Mary Ziegler, “After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate” (Harvard UP, 2016) May 10, 2016

Show notes

In this podcast I talk with Mary Ziegler, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law about her book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Ziegler’s work revolves around Roe v. Wade and uses this landmark American abortion rights case to explore broad questions such as litigation as a vessel for social change and the role the court plays in democracy. To explore these questions, in addition to archival research Ziegler also did over one hundred oral histories. This method has allowed her to go beyond caricatures of people in the pro-life and anti-abortion camps and to delve deeply into their motivations and look at the angles they approached the abortion issue with great precision.

Roe is often seen as a cautionary tale for judicial intervention as described for example by both right leaning Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and left leaning Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg. Her research reveals, however, that much of the polarization that we’ve blamed on the Supreme Court had little to do with what the court said in Roe. She discusses how the bright line divide between the pro-life and pro-choice movements had not yet coalesced in the 1970s.

Some other topics we discuss are:

–Whether Roe prematurely ended debate about the meaning or scope of abortion rights

–The forces that brought together the political right and the pro-life movement

–Roe as a canvas onto which activists could project different strategic aims

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Matthew H. Sommer, “Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China” (U of California Press, 2015) May 04, 2016

Show notes

First things first: Matthew H. Sommer‘s new book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and/or the history of gender. Based on 1200 legal cases from the central and local archives of the Qing dynasty, and focusing on the rural poor rather than the elite, Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (University of California Press, 2015) looks carefully at polyandry, wife sale, and a variety of intermediate practices that mobilized a woman’s sexual & reproductive labor to help support her family. In a series of chapters that use fascinating stories and documents to transform how we understand what constitutes Qing law, Sommer’s book compellingly argues for the impossibility of maintaining a clear-cut, binary distinction between sex work and marriage in the Qing. The records on which Sommer bases this magisterial account are full of stories that are themselves worth the price of admission, sensitively rendering the lives of husbands, wives, children, and their communities as they attempted to navigate difficult, complex, and moving circumstances. This is a book that will change not only how we understand marriage, gender, family, and sex in late imperial China, but also how we think about these and related concepts more broadly conceived. Highly recommended!

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Peter K. Enns, “Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World” (Cambridge UP, 2016) May 02, 2016

Show notes

Peter K. Enns is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Enns is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

The rise of mass incarceration in the United States is one of the most critical outcomes of the last half-century. Incarceration Nation combines close analysis of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns with 60 years of data analysis. In contrast to conventional wisdom, Enns shows that over this time period, politicians responded to an increasingly punitive public by pushing policy in a more punitive direction. The book also shows that media coverage of rising crime rates fueled the public’s attitudes. More recently, a decline in public punitiveness helps explain the current bipartisan calls for criminal justice reform.

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Kathleen Holscher, “Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico” (Oxford UP, 2012) Apr 30, 2016

Show notes

In New Mexico, before World War Two, Catholic sisters in full habits routinely taught in public schools. In her fascinating new book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012), Dr. Kathleen Holscher explores how this curious situation arose and how this partnership between public schools and female religious orders was brought to an end by the court case Zellers v. Huff. Through a sensitive and rich exploration of diverse sources, including trial transcripts and her own interviews, Holscher captures the complex ways people in New Mexico and the wider United States understood religious freedom and the proper relationship between church and state while constructing a fascinating and ultimately moving narrative of division and reconciliation.

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Douglas Clark, “Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943)” (Earnshaw Books, 2016) Apr 11, 2016

Show notes

Douglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnational histories as it shaped modern China and Japan. Clark is both historian and master storyteller in this work, crafting a study moves readers chronologically through a story of extraterritoriality from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, while introducing some amazing figures and characters along the way. (Keep a lookout, readers, for the “man’s man” who meets a ghost and asks it if it’s drunk.) Clark pays special attention to analyzing the very different results of the impact of extraterritoriality in Japan and China. Enjoy!

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research and writing concern the histories of science, medicine, materiality, and their translations in early modern China. You can find out more about her work by visiting www.carlanappi.com. She can be reach at carlanappi@gmail.com.

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Mariah Adin, “The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s” (Praeger, 2014) Mar 24, 2016

Show notes

Stereotypes should always be viewed with skepticism. That said, when we consider Jewish kids from Brooklyn we ordinarily think of well-behaved, studious types on their way to “good schools” and professions of one sort or another. Rude boys roving the streets of New York seeking to “cleanse” the city by assaulting and even killing “bums” do not readily come to mind. Yet there were such Jewish thugs in the 1950s. Mariah Adin tells their tale in her wonderful book The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s (Praeger, 2014).

In the summer of 1954, the Brooklyn “Thrill Killers” murdered two men and tortured several others. All of the victims were essentially indigent men. After the boys were captured, it was discovered that their leader, troubled teenager Robert Tractenberg, was fascinated with the Nazis. Not only that, he was a big fan of violent horror comic books, some of which contained avenging characters. These facts led investigators to believe that the message found in the comics influenced the Thrill Killers’ violent mission and methods. In other words, the violent comics were corrupting youth and were, perhaps, at the root of a perceived national upsurge in “juvenile delinquency.” If this were true, then some sort of censorship might be in order. But what of constitutional considerations? Listen in and learn how it all played out.

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Mitra Sharafi, “Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Mar 02, 2016

Show notes

Parsis, also known as Zoroastrians, were deeply entwined with the colonial legal system of British India and Burma, far beyond what one might expect from their relativity small numbers. Mitra Sharafi, in her wonderful new book Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), explores this anomaly and how – as legislators, lawyers, litigants, judges and lobbyists – they managed to maintain the contours of their distinctive ethno-religious community. With fascinating legal cases, lively personalties and a deep discussion of how identity and litigation interact, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia is a compelling and engaging account of a community with a unique and intriguing relationship with colonial rule.

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Richard L. Hasen, “Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections” (Yale UP, 2016) Feb 15, 2016

Show notes

Richard L. Hasen has written Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (Yale University Press, 2016). Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.

In the midst of the most expensive presidential contest in U.S. history, is money buying access and influence? Are super PACs corrupting the democratic process? Or are eager supporter simply exercising their First Amendment rights? In Plutocrats United, Hasen argues that these may be the wrong questions and the long-standing debate between corruption and free speech – so long a part of constitutional discussions of the issues – is in need of an overhaul. Instead, he suggests that a renewed focus on political equality could reshape the way the country and the Supreme Court considered the role of money in politics. Hasen makes specific policy recommendations for what a new campaign finance regime might look like, and why this new approach would advance the democracy as well as the principle of political equality.

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