New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

David Churchill et al., "Historical Criminology" (Routledge, 2021) May 21, 2023

Show notes

Historical Criminology(Routledge, 2022)breaks new ground by challenging researchers to question what we do, and why we do it. It draws out what criminologists can learn from historians, and examines the concept of historical criminology not as a sub-discipline, but as a core approach to doing criminology. The book questions the way that we think about time as a concept - in the past, the present and the future - and the way that rethinking time and temporality can help understand and respond to crime. In the context of historical criminology, the concept of 'historical thinking' reveals the implicit values, assumptions and methods of knowledge production which are sustained by dominant historical and sociological modes of thinking.

The book is essential reading for criminologists, for students and teachers of theory, concepts and methods in criminology.

Associate Professor David Churchill researches historical criminology and criminal justice history, focusing on policing, security and crime control in modern Britain at The University of Leeds.

Professor Henry Yeomans is a historical criminologist who specialises in the study of alcohol regulation at The University of Leeds.

Dr Iain Channing is a Lecturer in Criminology at and Criminal Justice at The University of Plymouth, who specialises in policing in historical and contemporary contexts.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Philip Pettit, "The State" (Princeton UP, 2023) May 20, 2023

Show notes

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and other people.

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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American Conservatism, Natural Law, and the Good Life: A Conversation with Robert P. George May 20, 2023

Show notes

What are American conservatives trying to conserve? What is Natural Law, and how can we know it? Is there a single "good life"? Robert P. George, Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, joins the show to answer these questions and others in the Season One finale.

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Mark Paul, "The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2023) May 18, 2023

Show notes

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic conditions for the "pursuit of happiness." For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace--nothing more. As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation--thanks in large part to a particularly influential cadre of economists--has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American society: rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

In The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights(University of Chicago Press, 2023), Paul shows how economic rights--rights to necessities like housing, employment, and health care--have been a part of the American conversation since the Revolutionary War and were a cornerstone of both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Their recuperation, he argues, would at long last make good on the promise of America's founding documents. By drawing on FDR's proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Paul outlines a comprehensive policy program to achieve a more capacious and enduring version of American freedom. Among the rights he enumerates are the right to a good job, the right to an education, the right to banking and financial services, and the right to a healthy environment.

Replete with discussions of some of today's most influential policy ideas--from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal--The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right--to ground America's next era in the country's progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.

Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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America & Democracy Ep. 1: Robert I. Rotberg on Corruption May 16, 2023

Show notes

In this series of interviews from the MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today.

In this, the first episode, Robert I. Rotberg (author of Anticorruption)discusses corruption - what is it? where is it? And is it getting worse? He explains the long history of corruption in the USA, as well as the measures that can be taken to eradicate it. We also explore issues of corruption across the globe, including the Lava Jato case in Brazil, the authoritarian anti-corruption of Rwanda and the ways in which corporate elites shape politics in countries like the US and the UK.

Robert I. Rotberg is President Emeritus of the World Peace Foundation, Founding Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Program on Intrastate Conflict, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft, Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness in the Twenty-First Century, Transformative Political Leadership, and numerous other books.

Hosted by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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Michelle Smirnova, "The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain" (Duke UP, 2023) May 15, 2023

Show notes

In The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain(Duke UP, 2023), Michelle Smirnova argues that the ongoing opioid drug epidemic is the result of an endless cycle in which suffering is medicalized and drug use is criminalized. Drawing on interviews with eighty incarcerated individuals in Missouri correctional institutions, Smirnova shows how contradictions in medical practices, social ideals, and legal policies disproportionately criminalize the poor for their social condition. This criminalization further exacerbates and perpetuates drug addiction and poverty.

Tracing the processes by which social issues are constructed as biomedical ones that necessitate pharmacological intervention, Smirnova highlights how inequitable surveillance, policing, and punishment of marginalized populations intensify harms associated with both treatment and punishment, especially given that the distinctions between the two have become blurred. By focusing on the stories of people whose pain and pharmaceutical treatment led to incarceration, Smirnova challenges the binary of individual and social problems, effectively exploring how the conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment of substance use may exacerbate outcomes such as relapse, recidivism, poverty, abuse, and death.

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Ewelina U. Ochab and David Alton, "State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change It" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) May 08, 2023

Show notes

In State Responses to Crimes of Genocide: What Went Wrong and How to Change it (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Dr Ewelina U. Ochab and Lord Alton of Liverpool bring together ongoing situations of genocide around the globe. Foregrounding the testimonies of victims, the authors' multiple visits to the aftermath of atrocities, and the countless actions taken by Lord Alton in British Parliament over his 40 year political career, this book is a chilling but essential read which compels a response. Atrocities are contextualised in the history of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It poses the question as to what, if anything, has improved since the Genocide Convention was enacted in 1948.

In our interview, Dr Ochab and Lord Alton make the case that the international response to recent and ongoing genocides perpetrated against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, against belief minorities in Syria and Iraq, and in Nigeria and Dafur, have been inadequate. Instead, the global community must act to predict, prevent, protect and punish genocide. And while recent responses to these atrocities would seem to give little hope for the future, the book does aim to motivate action to prevent the crime of genocide in the future.

Dr Ewelina U. Ochab is a human rights advocate, author and co-founder of the Coalition for Genocide Response.

Lord David Alton of Liverpool was a Member of the House of Commons in British Parliament for 18 years, and is now an Independent Crossbench Life Peer.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Supurna Banerjee et al., "The Violent Domestic Law: Its Practice and Strategies of Survival" (Zubaan Academic, 2022) May 08, 2023

Show notes

In 2005, after considerable campaigning by women’s groups, the Indian government brought in an important new law, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA). A civil law, the PWDVA was meant to combat violence against women in familial and intimate spaces.

In The Violent Domestic Law: Its Practice and Strategies of Survival(Zubaan Academic, 2022), the authors ask: how effective has this law been? Have there been any changes in institutional regimes and their politics as a result of this legislation? They look at seven districts of West Bengal and interrogate, through the testimonies of survivors, whether the law reshapes the domestic, or whether the embeddedness of violence in the domestic is so complete that change through law must necessarily be partial and imperfect. Importantly, the questions the authors ask go beyond the heteronormative approach that centres only the married woman in the discourse around domestic violence. They include the voices of lesbian and transgender women, as well as women with physical and psycho-social disabilities. Given these unique insights, The Violent Domestic will be a welcome addition to legal and gender studies.

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The Future of Guantanamo: A Discussion with James Connell May 08, 2023

Show notes

Will Guantanamo ever be closed down? Some people are still there – all these years after 9/11. So why are they still held and when will it end? James Connell is representing one of those who remains there, Ammar al Baluchi, and tells Owen Bennett Jones about the future of Guantanamo.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, "The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism" (Princeton UP, 2023) May 07, 2023

Show notes

Is libertarianism a progressive doctrine, or a reactionary one? Does libertarianism promise to liberate the poor and the marginalized from the yoke of state oppression, or does talk of "equal liberty" obscure the ways in which libertarian doctrines serve the interests of the rich and powerful?

Through an examination of the history of libertarianism, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism(Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the answer is (and always has been): both. In this book, the authors explore the neglected 19th century roots of libertarianism to show that it emerged first as a radical and progressive doctrine. Libertarianism took a conservative turn in the 20th century primarily as a reaction against the rise of state socialism. Now, with international communism no longer a threat, libertarianism is in the midst of an identity crisis, with progressive and reactionary elements struggling to claim the doctrine as their own, most notably on issues of race. This book tells the history of libertarianism through an examination of six defining themes: private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, individualism, spontaneous order, and individual liberty.

Matt Zwolinski is professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, where he is director of the Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy.

John Tomasi is president of Heterodox Academy in New York City.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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