New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

Liz Curran, "Better Law for a Better World: New Approaches to Law Practice and Education" (Routledge, 2021) Mar 20, 2023

Show notes

In Better Law for a Better World: New Approaches to Law Practice and Education(Routledge, 2021)I spoke with Dr Liz Curran about the urgent need for innovation in law, legal practice, and legal education. In her book, she challenges the adversarial and hierarchical nature of the legal system, to uncover the harms that these processes and systems cause by the failure to recognise the person behind the legal problem. Drawing on both quantitive and qualitative research, and also her own wealth of experience as a practitioner and educator, Dr Curran offers insights into the way that the legal system fails the most vulnerable. However, the book, is not without hope; it offers models of better practice, and space for further research provide the incentive and innovation necessary to create better law for a better world.

Dr Liz Curran is an Associate Professor in the School of Law at Nottingham Trent University.

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Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien, "Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Mar 20, 2023

Show notes

Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien's book Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege(U Minnesota Press, 2021) collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance. Ranging from the historical to the contemporary and grappling with Indigenous land struggles around the globe, these narratives showcase both scholarly and creative forms of expression, constructing a multifaceted book of diverse perspectives that will inform readers while provoking them toward further research into Indigenous resilience.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. His forthcoming book, Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas), will be out in December 2023.

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Hernán Flom, "The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Mar 16, 2023

Show notes

Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Instead of tracking the path that illegal drugs take or examining how the criminal justice system works in Latin American countries, Flom has focused, instead, on the illegal drug markets as economic and political institutions to examine how they actually operates within Brazil and Argentina. From this perspective, we learn quite a lot about market forces, civilian and police institutions, and “law and order” approaches in both these countries. The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America(Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a comparative analysis of the criminal markets in these two countries—Brazil and Argentina—as well as differentiating between how these markets work in larger, urban centers, and in smaller cities. This effectively teases out distinctions between how police work with or against these criminal markets, and how the local and national politicians often articulate distinct approaches to how to manage criminal enterprises.

The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America examines patterns in the relationships between police, politicians, drug cartels, and criminal actors. These patterns are not necessarily new, but as Flom makes clear, they operate in different ways in different venues and with regard to different types of informal arrangements. In doing a cross national comparison as well as internal comparisons within country, Flom has been able to get at some distinctions that come from the colonial past that has also led to different racial configurations in these comparative urban environments. The research also measures different levels of both police and criminal violence, to gage the kinds of relationships that may be in place between these often-opposing entities. The relationship between the police, as subnational units, and politicians also figures into the various levels of police violence. The Informal Regulations of Criminal Markets in Latin America gets at the key variables that come into play in regard to police conduct and the kinds of policies that politicians are both articulating and trying to implement—often through the police.

This is a multi-dimensional analysis that explores criminal markets from important and unique perspectives. Flom worked at the National Ministry of Security in Argentina during the course of this research, and he is able to bring his scholarly expertise as well as his own experience to the research and analysis, making this a particularly rich comparison across countries and urban centers within those countries.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Bradford Vivian, "Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education" (Oxford UP, 2022) Mar 15, 2023

Show notes

If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal orthodoxy and forcibly silence anyone who dares to disagree. These commentators lament the demise of free speech and academic freedom. But what is really happening on college campuses?

Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2022) shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years, with potentially dangerous results. Popular but highly misleading claims about a so-called free speech crisis and a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses emerged in the mid-2010s and continue to shape public discourse about higher education across party lines. Such disingenuous claims impede constructive deliberation about higher learning while normalizing suspect ideas about First Amendment freedoms and democratic participation.

Taking a non-partisan approach, Bradford Vivian argues that reporting on campus culture has grossly exaggerated the importance and representativeness of a small number of isolated events; misleadingly advocated for an artificial parity between liberals and conservatives as true viewpoint diversity; mischaracterized the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces; and purposefully confused critique and protest with censorship and "cancel culture." Organizations and think tanks generate pseudoscientific data to support this discourse, then advocate for free speech in highly specific ways that actually limit speech in general. In the name of free speech and viewpoint diversity, we now see restrictions on the right to protest and laws banning certain books, theories, and subjects from schools.

By deconstructing the political and rhetorical development of the free speech crisis, Vivian not only provides a powerful corrective to contemporary views of higher education, but provides a blueprint for readers to identify and challenge misleading language--and to understand the true threats to our freedoms.

Bradford Vivian is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and past Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University. His previous books include Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (OUP 2017) and Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (2010), which received the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address awarded by the National Communication Association.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Miriam Bak Mckenna, "Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law" (Brill, 2022) Mar 14, 2023

Show notes

Miriam Bak McKenna is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University (Denmark). Her first monograph, Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law(Brill, 2023), adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. The value of the book’s approach lies not only in a more nuanced understanding of self-determination’s legal history, but also in excavating the multiple ways in which actors, particularly those from the Global South, have challenged the existing normative and legal structures which rendered them unequal under the European system of international law. Rethinking this process touches on issues that are relevant not only to debates about the enduring legacy of imperialism in our present, but also to contemporary discussions of the position self-determination has come to occupy in international law.

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Damian Alan Pargas, "Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

In Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'spaces of freedom' for fugitive slaves in North America between 1800 and 1860, and answers the questions: How and why did enslaved people flee to – and navigate – different destinations throughout the continent, and to what extent did they succeed in evading recapture and re-enslavement? Taking a continental approach, this study highlights the diversity of slave fight by conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct – and continuously evolving – spaces of freedom. Namely, spaces of informal freedom in the US South, where enslaved people attempted to flee by passing as free blacks; spaces of semi-formal freedom in the US North, where slavery was abolished but the precise status of fugitive slaves was contested; and spaces of formal freedom in Canada and Mexico, where slavery was abolished and runaways were considered legally free and safe from re-enslavement.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Ke Li, "Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China" (Stanford UP, 2022) Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal ones. She demonstrates this approach in Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2022), in which she offers a sophisticated “historically charged, culturalist perspective” of state legal practice in China, worked out over 15 years of immersive research and careful writing.

Ke Li joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss why research on authoritarian legality fails to give culture its due, the differences between practice-oriented inquiry and studies that concentrate on intersubjective meaning-making, causal inference in interpretive research, and descriptive and creative writing in the social sciences. Ke also has some great fieldwork tips for budding ethnographers.

Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and in Fall 2022 was a fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU.

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Richard Thompson Ford, "Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History" (Simon & Schuster, 2021) Mar 11, 2023

Show notes

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States.

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime.

In Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (Simon & Schuster, 2021), law professor and cultural critic Dr. Richard Thompson Ford presents a history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk down history’s red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing—rules that we often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes, you’ll never think of fashion as superficial again—and getting dressed will never be the same.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Book, 2022) Mar 10, 2023

Show notes

Jefferson Cowie discusses his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022), beginning with the book’s origin story, and then tracing the use of "freedom" to dominate others in Barbour County, Alabama, from Indian Removal in the 1830s through the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

This episode was produced for "Working History," the podcast of the Southern Labor Studies Association.

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Measure for Measure Episode 6: IQ Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

The Intelligence Quotient is a measure of intelligence that has life-or-death consequences. Should we trust it?

GUEST

Alan Gouddis is a Partner with Sherman & Sterling. He was recognized by The Legal 500 as a “Leading Lawyer” in M&A Litigation Defense in 2021.

This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman.

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