New Books in Law

Latest Episodes:

The Future of Race: A Discussion with John McWhorter Apr 26, 2022

Show notes

Race is the subject of passionate and increasingly angry debate. But amidst all the talk of unconscious bias it’s an area into which many fear to tread. In this podcast Professor McWhorter of Colombia University outlines his sometimes controversial views on these issues and explains why he wants to debate them in public. His latest book is Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio, 2021).

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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Kristin Henning, "The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth" (Pantheon Books, 2021) Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.'s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America's irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children.

Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of racism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents.

Especially in the wake of the recent unprecedented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth(Pantheon Books, 2021) is an essential book for our moment.

Donations to the Georgetown Law Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative can be made here.

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Clayton Howard, "The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

"I don't care what people do in their bedroom, but do they need to flaunt it?" This sentiment is a common refrain in American culture and politics when talking about LGBTQ rights, and as Ohio State historian Dr. Clayton Howard argues, it's a sentence with a history. In The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California (University of Pennsylvania, 2019), Howard traces the history of the idea of sexual privacy back to the era immediately after World War II, when the "Straight State" began more aggressively incentivizing and policing hetero- and homosexuality respectively. Through acts such as the GI Bill, housing became a central battleground in the Bay Area for determining what normative sex looked like. Soon, churches, schools, and the steps of city hall, all became fronts in a culture war that, as Howard argues, was not quite as black-and-white as scholars sometimes make it seem. Today, legislation such as Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill have their roots in debates over laws such as California's Briggs Initiative and indeed, stretch all the way back to San Francisco's mid-20th century life as a hub for military life in the Pacific. The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac is an in-depth look at how even the most private areas of an individual's life are often in fact very public indeed.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Michael L. Walker, "Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers, police lockups, and other temporary holding facilities are regularly overcrowded, poorly funded, and the buildings are often in disrepair. American jails admit over ten million people every year, but very little is known about what happens to them while they're locked away.

Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail(Oxford UP, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time and what it does to men. Michael L. Walker spent several extended spells in jail, having been arrested while trying to pay parking tickets in graduate school. This book is an intimate account of his experience and in it he shares the routines, rhythms, and subtle meanings that come with being incarcerated. Walker shows how punishment in jail is much more than the deprivation of liberties. It is, he argues, purposefully degrading. Jail creates a racial politics that organizes daily life, moves men from clock time to event time, normalizes trauma, and imbues residents with substantial measures of vulnerability. Deputies used self-centered management styles to address the problems associated with running a jail, some that magnified individual conflicts to potential group conflicts and others that created divisions between residents for the sake of control. And though not every deputy indulged, many gave themselves over to the pleasures of punishment.

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Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers(U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion.

McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state.

This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era.

Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Read more by Charles McCrary:

"The Supreme Court and the Strange Politics of the 'Sincere Believer,'" Religion & Politics, Apr. 2022
"The Antisocial Strain of Sincere Religious Beliefs Is on the Rise," The New Republic, Apr. 2022
"The Baffling Legal Standard Fueling Religious Objections to Vaccine Mandates," The New Republic, Sept. 2021

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David P. Forsythe, "Advanced Introduction to the Politics of International Human Rights" (Edward Elgar, 2021) Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

“Human rights in public policy are constructed by diplomats and politicians in an international legislative process, not discovered amongst the clouds of metaphysics.” In "Advanced Introduction to the Politics of International Human Rights (Edward Elgar, 2021), David P. Forsythe, general editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Human Rights (5 vol.) and pioneer of the field of human rights and international relations studies distills insights gained over his long career about the progress and challenges of the human rights enterprise in a world that remains structured by a life-and-death competition between territorial states.

A self-defined “liberal realist” Forsythe believes that “individuals can make a difference in constructing a world sympathetic to human rights – up to a point”. In this slim volume, he stresses the difficulties of interjecting human rights into foreign policy and international politics, while recognising the considerable progress that has been made over time. Focusing on international organizations, states, corporations, and private advocacy groups, Forsythe addresses key themes including war, migration, climate change, and slavery.

Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights practitioner with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School.

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Suzanne E. Scoggins, "Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest" (Cornell UP, 2021) Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

China has the reputation for being a strong security state. After the pro-democracy Tiananmen protests, the Chinese government moved to increase stability maintenance – and that approach is reflected in today’s suppression of social unrest in Xinjiang where somewhere between 800,000-2 million members of the Uighur minority have been interned in camps. Throughout the country, the government has maintained stability by installing millions of cameras. The Chinese and International press emphasize these actions – projecting a view of China as a strong security state.

But Suzanne E. Scoggins argues that the decision to prioritize stability maintenance comes at the expense of everyday policing. In remarkable interviews with police officers and analysis of policing journal articles she assesses resource allocation, police reforms, and structural patterns of control – to find a weak police force unable to protect citizens against violent crime. Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest(Cornell UP, 2021) provides a surprising – and more accurate – understanding of how the police function in China – how they can be so ineffective at everyday crime management while still being very good at stability maintenance. The podcast includes a remarkable conversation about how research access in China is changing – as well as the role of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Dr. Suzanne E. Scoggins is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Asian Studies at Clark University. She is also a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow at The National Committee on United States-China Relations.

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Nandita Sharma, "Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants" (Duke UP, 2020) Apr 20, 2022

Show notes

In today's program, we speak to Nandita Sharma, activist scholar and Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. We talk about Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants(Duke University Press, 2020).

In Home Rule, Sharma brilliantly traces the "historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as 'colonial invaders.'" She theorizes the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states wherein the category of the Native (initially referred to as such to demarcate colonized status) has been revitalized and claims to autochthony have become the basis of "true national belonging." In consequence, migrants have been facing exclusion, expulsion, and even extermination. The hardening of nationalisms in the Postcolonial New World Order has contained demands for decolonization, leaving their potential unfulfilled. Sharma forcefully and convincingly shows that the only way forward is by building a common wherein the ruling categories of Native and Migrant are dissolved.

Jochen Schmon is a PhD Student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. You can reach him on Twitter @JohenShmon.

Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. You can reach her own Twitter @drnrts.

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The University Network for Human Rights: A Discussion with Jim Calvallaro Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

The University Network for Human Rights facilitates supervised undergraduate engagement in the practice of human rights at colleges and universities in the United States and across the globe. The University Network partners with advocacy organizations and communities affected or threatened by abusive state, corporate, or private conduct to advance human rights at home and abroad; trains undergraduate students in interdisciplinary human rights protection and advocacy; and collaborates with academics and human rights practitioners in other parts of the world to foster the creation of practical, interdisciplinary programs in human rights.

James (Jim) Cavallaro is Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He has taught human rights law and practice for nearly a quarter-century, most recently at Wesleyan University, Stanford Law School (2011-2019), and Harvard Law School (2002-2011).

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Kelly Bauer, "Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) Apr 18, 2022

Show notes

The 1980s and '90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights. In Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy(U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.

Kelly Bauer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nebraska Wesleyan University, and member of the Red De Politólogas – #NoSinMujeres. Her research and teaching examine state policy and rhetoric about Indigenous rights, irregular migration, and human security regimes in South America. She also researches pedagogy and knowledge production in political science classrooms, and migration politics and rhetoric in Nebraska. Her work has been externally funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship, and APSA Centennial Center.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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