New Books in Law

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How Bolsonaro was Convicted: The Role of the Judiciary During and After Autocratization Apr 24, 2026

Show notes

Former Brazilian president Bolsonaro was found to have attempted a coup after losing the 2022 presidential elections, and he was convicted to 27 years in prison. Such a conviction is unusual both for Brazil and in global comparison and speaks to the difficult but crucial role the judiciary can play when an elected leader tries to concentrate power and exceed constitutional constraints. In this second PPP episode about Brazil (you can listen to the first one, on the role of the military, here), host Licia Cianetti talks to Luciano Da Ros and Manoel Gehrke about the role the courts played in Bolsonaro’s downfall, based on their recent article “How to Bring Authoritarians to Justice” published in the January 2026 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

Transcript here

Guests:

Luciano Da Ros is Associate Professor of political science at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. His research explores the links between democracy, judicial politics, corruption and anticorruption, particularly in Latin America, and he is the co-author of the book Brazilian Politics on Trial: Corruption and Reform under Democracy (Lynne Rienner, 2022).

Manoel Gehrke is a Research Fellow at the University of Pisa, Italy, and former Research Fellow at CEDAR. He works on political accountability, contemporary threats to democracy, judicial politics, and the political economy of environmental degradation. He has published widely on the causes and consequences of prosecuting and convicting former heads of government.

Presenter:

Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Follow us on LikedIn

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Masako Ichihara, "Climate Change Litigation in Japan: Cases, Challenges, and Opportunities for Environmental Law" (Brill, 2026) Apr 19, 2026

Show notes

Climate Change Litigation in Japan: Cases, Challenges, and Opportunities for Environmental Law (Brill, 2026) provides the details of Japanese climate litigation, positioning them both within the global trends of climate litigation and on the trajectory of Japanese past pollution lawsuits. It identifies the barriers that hinders the number of climate cases in Japan, a country known with a significant low litigation use. It then discusses the future prospects for climate change litigation in Japan by comparing with tobacco litigation in the United States. This original work makes a significant contribution to the international academic community, by describing Japan's climate cases, previously little known internationally.

Masako Ichihara, Ph.D. (2021), Kyoto Univeristy, is Program-specific Assistant Professor at the Unit of the Environment and Law, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Policy, Kyoto University.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Manuel Barcia, "Pirate Imperialism: Trade, Abolition, and Global Suppression of Maritime Raiding, 1825–1870" (Yale UP, 2026) Apr 18, 2026

Show notes

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding. From the Atlantic basin to the western Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, and Southeast Asia and China, imperial powers claimed that progress was being held back by the barbarity and greed of pirates, who repeatedly attacked imperial vessels. The suppression of piracy, justified under the banner of spreading civilization and free trade and abolishing slavery and the slave trade, provided both western and non-western powers with a back door for territorial expansion and the enforcement of imperialist agendas.

In Pirate Imperialism: Trade, Abolition, and Global Suppression of Maritime Raiding, 1825–1870 (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Manuel Barcia tells the story of these conflicts, showing how imperialist powers frequently used anti–maritime raiding efforts as excuses to cement western supremacy in various parts of the world, while simultaneously resorting to violent means that were indistinguishable from the methods of those they accused of being pirates.

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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Victor Li, "Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) Apr 15, 2026

Show notes

Supreme Pressure: The Rejection of John J. Parker and the Birth of the Modern Supreme Court Confirmation Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) examines the 1930 Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a turning point in American judicial politics. Alarmed by some of his past statements and opinions, labor and civil rights groups mounted a fierce campaign to block his confirmation. Not only was control of the Supreme Court hanging in the balance, but Parker's nomination symbolized a profound clash of ideologies, political agendas, economic doctrines, and interpretations of the Constitution. Their efforts sparked a dramatic Senate revolt, marking the first successful grassroots campaign to block a Supreme Court nominee.

By exploring the circumstances of Parker's rejection, this book traces how that battle laid the foundation for today's highly partisan and contentious confirmation process. The book also reintroduces Parker as a consequential but largely forgotten figure in American jurisprudence--one whose rulings helped shape the South's legal response to Brown v. Board of Education. Beyond the nomination fight, it delves into Parker's political campaigns, judicial opinions, and relationships with key public figures, charting his dramatic rise, humiliating defeat, and enduring influence.

Packed with intrigue, strategy, and the clash of competing ideologies, this is the story of how one nomination forever changed the rules of the game.

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Lisa Siraganian, "The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots" (Verso, 2026) Apr 14, 2026

Show notes

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.
Lisa Siraganian’s The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots (Verso, 2026) reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand’s Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Siraganian uncovers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, “she” is transformed into a subject in the law without the corresponding legal duties that protect us from her.
At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.

Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA). Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was the Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, Volume D (1914-1945) (2022).

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu.

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Tim Connor et al., "Global Business and Local Struggle: Reimagining Non-Judicial Remedy for Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2025) Apr 10, 2026

Show notes

In the quest for human rights justice for communities and workers whose rights are breached by transnational businesses, non-judicial mechanisms (NJMs) are often deployed, but how effective are they? Global Business and Local Struggle: Reimagining Non-Judicial Remedy for Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2025) creates a blueprint for reforming transnational human rights NJMs and for helping communities and workers to use them. Through 587 interviews with 1100 individuals over five years of research in Indonesia and India, the authors delve into the practical workings of NJMs in diverse industries and contexts. The findings reveal that while NJMs are limited in providing standalone remedies, they can play a valuable role within a broader regulatory ecosystem. Combining rich empirical data, multi-method analyses and a new theoretical framework, the authors argue for a multi-pronged approach to human rights redress. Their findings will advance both academic and policy debates about the merits and shortcomings of NJMs.

Interview with Tim Connor and Fiona Haines.

Interview by Caitlin Murphy, Lecturer, RMIT University and Fellow, Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law.

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Emotions of LGBT Rights Apr 06, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks to Senthorun Raj about the Emotions of LGBT Rights. Emotions from disgust and fear to love and joy shape the legal frameworks that attempt to govern human sexual behavior around the world. Sen cautions against dividing emotions into good and bad, but instead asks us to take a critical stance on all emotions, to understand how they shape our policies.

In the episode, we talk about Sara Ahmed, the Stonewall Riots, conversion therapy, and efforts to mandate for and against inclusive sex education. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Sen’s book, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press 2025) uses emotion as a novel analytic lens to understand, analyse, and critique the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts over LGBT rights. Emotions are central to the pursuit, organisation, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in law. Drawing from critical legal theories, this book cultivates the concept of “emotional grammar” to show how emotions structure law reform pursuits by threading together Hansard, legislation, case law, law reform consultations, and statutory guidance. By doing so, it explains why addressing this emotional grammar is important for scholars, lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists seeking to navigate conflicts over LGBT rights and reforms that aim to repair the inequalities faced by LGBT people.

Senthorun Raj is an academic human rights lawyer with expertise in issues of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He works as a Reader in Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sen’s research and teaching interests include LGBTIQ+ rights, emotion, culture, equalities and human rights law, legal education, and critical legal theory. His latest monograph, builds on his previous book, Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020), which explored the ways emotions shape legal judgments that enable progress for LGBT people. He is also the co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025).

The image for this episode is a coloured lithograph, from 1868, depicting a double rainbow, by René Henri Digeon after Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat. It was sourced by Lili Epstein for High Theory from the Wellcome Collection.

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Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, "Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State" (Cornell UP, 2017) Apr 04, 2026

Show notes

The book, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Cornell UP, 2017) is Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello’s efforts to account for the origins and strategies of the women's suffrage movement in the New York State. The book dwelled on evolution of the women’s suffrage movement in the progressive era and discusses the various suffragist strategies employed in quest for women’s right to franchise from early legislative petitions to more innovative marketing approaches. It explains how the women’s suffrage movement evolved over time, using various tactics like petitions, parades, and door-to-door canvassing. The book highlights the diverse groups that supported the suffrage movement, including rural women, working-class immigrants, and African American women, all united by their common interest in gaining the right to vote. The book also acknowledges the different ideologies of the suffragist groups and their approaches to activism.

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ LinkedIn | ORCID | Meta

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Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson, "Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away" (U Hawaiʻi Press, 2026) Apr 01, 2026

Show notes

“Japanese war crimes are notorious. During the Second World War, as Japanese forces overran Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they massacred, murdered, raped, and tortured Asians and Westerners who fell into their hands. They also mistreated hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian internees. After the war ended in 1945, the victorious Allied powers conducted trials in which they brought Japanese perpetrators to justice, as they also did with Germans in Europe…

In this provocative new book, Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away, published by University of Hawaiʻi Press (2026), historians Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson analyse thirteen case studies of Japanese war crimes. They attempt to answer a crucial question with contemporary relevance, how does one become a war criminal?

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Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026) Apr 01, 2026

Show notes

The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women (Duke UP, 2026) examines U.S. laws designed to rescue immigrant survivors from gender and sexual violence only if they agree to cooperate with policing. Drawing upon ethnographic stories with legal and social service advocates who work with Asian immigrant women, the book engages abolition feminisms and antiblackness to critique "victim" as a genre of the human in law and produced through racial configurations of the model minority myth and the good/bad immigrant paradigm.

Author Lee Ann S. Wang is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies. She is also a Co-PI on the research initiative, Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories, housed at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.

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