New Books in Law

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Pandemic Perspectives 3: A Conversation with Samuel Moyn Mar 23, 2022

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In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of History at Yale University, about neoliberalism, human rights and what our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about our true values.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Joanna Mishtal, "The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland" (Ohio UP, 2015) Mar 21, 2022

Show notes

In the fall of 2020, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal decreed that the country’s near-total ban on abortion was too liberal; henceforth, pregnancies could be terminated only in cases of rape, incest, or imminent threat to the mother’s life. The court’s decision triggered a nationwide Women’s Strike, whose social mobilization galvanized reproductive rights advocacy across Europe.

In the wake of the Polish mass protests, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a crucial moment to re-visit anthropologist Joanna Mishtal’s ground-breaking book The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Ohio University Press, 2015). Mishtal recast the decades since communism’s collapse as a time of joint Church-State war on reproductive rights, as well as feminism, which was painted as either a communist legacy or a foreign import. The Politics of Morality examines the contradiction between an emerging democracy on the one hand, and a declining tolerance for women’s rights and political and religious pluralism on the other. Surveillance, control, and abuse of power are persistent themes in this revealing ethnography, which has had an enormous scholarly impact in the study of gender and religion & politics in Eastern Europe, but carries powerful lessons far beyond its immediate field.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Labor Exploitation and Human Trafficking in Businesses Mar 21, 2022

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In the modern world, human trafficking and slavery take various forms: one such example is forced labor. But understanding exactly how and where forced labor might occur has been a challenge for researchers and regulatory authorities.

In the third episode of our new themed series In Chains, we speak with Dr. Alexis Aronowitz from University College Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, who is the author of the article, “Regulating business involvement in labor exploitation and human trafficking”.

In her article, Dr. Aronowitz has presented various case studies of labor exploitation in the service industry, such as the cocoa industry in sub-Saharan Africa. In this episode, she further talks about how exploitative labor in businesses can be regulated using various approaches.

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Kecia Ali, ed., "Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century" (Open BU, 2021) Mar 18, 2022

Show notes

In Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century, readers find a wide range of texts on Muslim Americans’ experiences with questions of marriage and divorce in an effort to do what is deemed Islamically acceptable. This exciting reader, which brings together previously published as well as new content, includes the broad themes of wedding, marriage, and divorce in the Muslim American experience. More specifically, the reader aims to explore the diversity in Islamic legal and theoretical thought, marriage and divorce practices, marriage contracts, wedding customs, and related issues.

In today’s very vibrant and engaging conversation, I speak with Kecia Ali, the editor of the reader, in addition to several contributors, who are Zahra Ayubi, Aminah McCloud, and Asifa Quraishi-Landes. Each scholar speaks on her contribution to the volume—Ayubi on divorce, Quraishi-Landes on marriage contracts and Islamic law, and McCloud on African American Muslim women as they transition to Islam, get married, and face issues of male guardianship. Further, we discuss why an Islamic marriage even matters to Muslims, and Kecia and Asifa share their views on fundamental issues with the Islamic marriage contract and whether, as Asifa suggests, it’s possible to re-imagine the Islamic marriage contract as a partnership contract rather than a sales contract.

The book, which is available for free, with a searchable PDF, through Boston University’s website, will be of interest to scholars and researchers interested in questions of marriage and divorce generally but more specifically in the context of Islam; individual practicing Muslims who seek resources on nikaah contracts, Islamic law, and divorce; Muslim and other religious leaders who serve Muslim communities; and undergraduate and graduate students in women’s and gender studies as well as religious studies courses.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?! (WTP?!), where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.

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Andrew Rudalevige, "By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power" (Princeton UP, 2021) Mar 17, 2022

Show notes

Andrew Rudalevige, the Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College, has a new book that examines the processes that transpires in the generation of executive orders—noting that the process itself is not simply done with the stroke of a pen. Rudalevige, an expert on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Executive Branch, started to pursue this particular research project as a result of some archival work he was doing at OMB. Because executive orders go through OMB, Rudalevige came upon decades of files of different proposed executive orders in his work on the Office of Management and Budget; and what seemed like a kind of side project became an extensive, quantitative, and qualitative study of the process that gives birth to an executive order or that may eventually kill an executive order.

By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power (Princeton UP, 2021) traces the process that brings together different voices from within the Executive Branch on the substance that becomes the executive order itself. The research is also situated in the context of a more and more gridlocked Congress, with one president after another finding themselves frustrated in their efforts to implement their agendas.

One in five executive orders are not issued. Those that are not issued are generally not random. But the process of advocating or pushing back on a potential order is complex and often involves a host of different agencies bargaining with teach other and with OMB and the president. This window into the process gives us significant insight into bureaucratic politics at the national level. This is also a reflection on how the White House and the bureaucracy work—can a president get something done from his perch in the Oval Office, or do particular agencies have jurisdiction and the capacity to move policy and ideas forward within the scope of established law and regulation? This is all explored in By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power, which is a fascinating look behind the scenes at how presidents and the bureaucracy interact.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Melvin I. Urofsky, "Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue" (Vintage, 2017) Mar 11, 2022

Show notes

In his major work, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue(Vintage, 2017), acclaimed historian and judicial authority Melvin Urofsky examines the great dissents throughout the Court's long history. Constitutional dialogue is one of the ways in which we as a people reinvent and reinvigorate our democratic society. The Supreme Court has interpreted the meaning of the Constitution, acknowledged that the Court's majority opinions have not always been right, and initiated a critical discourse about what a particular decision should mean before fashioning subsequent decisions--largely through the power of dissent.

Urofsky shows how the practice grew slowly but steadily, beginning with the infamous and now overturned case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) during which Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion upheld slavery and ending with the present age of incivility, in which reasoned dialogue seems less and less possible. Dissent on the court and off, Urofsky argues in this major work, has been a crucial ingredient in keeping the Constitution alive and must continue to be so.

Melvin I. Urofsky is an American historian and professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University.

William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association.

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Silvia M. Lindtner, "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation" (Princeton UP, 2020) Mar 10, 2022

Show notes

Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Author Silvia Lindtner unpacks how this promise of entrepreneurial life has influenced governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexist and racist violence and various forms of labor exploitation.

Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is a writer and ethnographer. She is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She is also a PIP (Public Intellectual Program) Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Lindtner's research focuses on the cultures and politics of technology innovation, including the labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life, data-driven futures, and the promise of democratized agency. Drawing from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, she writes about China's shifting position in the global political economy of computing, supply chains, industrial and agricultural production, and science and technology policy.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance.

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Alan Rubel et al., "Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 08, 2022

Show notes

Many have experienced moments where algorithms have made us uncomfortable or suspicious. In Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Rubel, Phan, and Castro outline the stories of teachers and citizens subject to the criminal justice system who face serious consequences at the hands of algorithms. With a focus on locating the a philosophical touchstone to these harms, the authors look at how ideas of autonomy and freedom are affected by algorithms. When algorithms afford those subject to their decisions no transparency to endorse its use or worse hide responsibility for their decision in a network of actors laundering their own agency, citizens are harmed and democracy is harmed. This book mount a forceful lens of what exactly algorithms in criminal justice, education, housing, elections and beyond can do to autonomy, freedom, and democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Dr. Alan Rubel is Professor and Director of the Information School at University of Wisconsin Madison.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Tina Sikka, "Sex, Consent and Justice: A New Feminist Framework" (Edinburgh UP, 2021) Mar 07, 2022

Show notes

Increasingly fraught debates about sex, consent, feminism, justice, law, and gender relations have taken centre stage in academic, journalistic and social media circles in recent years. This has resulted in myriad new theories, debates and mediated movements including #MeToo and #TimesUp. InSex, Consent, and Justice: A New Feminist Framework(Edinburgh UP), Tina Sikka explores many of the contradictions and tensions that make up these debates and movements. She looks at those that draw together contemporary understandings of justice, violence, consent, pleasure and desire.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Randy E. Barnett and Evan D. Bernick, "The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit" (Harvard UP, 2021) Mar 07, 2022

Show notes

Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the US constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. In The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Randy Barnett and Dr. Evan Bernick argue that the Supreme Court has long misunderstood or ignored the original meaning of the amendment’s key clauses, covering the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process of law, and the equal protection of the laws. In fact, they argue that “it is simply not the case that the Court’s current Fourteenth Amendment doctrine gives us everything that the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment promises.”

Dr. Barnett and Dr. Bernick contend that the Fourteenth Amendment was the culmination of decades of debates about the meaning of the antebellum constitution. Antislavery advocates advanced arguments informed by natural rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the common law. They also utilised what is today called public-meaning originalism. Although their arguments lost in the courts, the Republican Party was formed to advance an antislavery political agenda, eventually bringing about abolition. Then, when abolition alone proved insufficient to thwart Southern repression and provide for civil equality, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. It went beyond abolition to enshrine in the Constitution the concept of Republican citizenship and granted Congress power to protect fundamental rights and ensure equality before the law. Finally, Congress used its powers to pass Reconstruction-era civil rights laws that tell us much about the original scope of the amendment.

In this book, the authors identified the original meaning of the phrase “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” by examining the evidence from the Founding, from the antebellum period, from the drafting and ratification of the clause, and from the post-ratification interpretations in Congress and by courts and academic commentators. They argue that this mass of evidence shows that “privileges or immunities” encompassed civil rights, as distinguishes from “political” or “social” rights, and included the civil right to impartial treatment by civic institutions.” With attention to primary sources, the book shows how the principles of the Declaration eventually came to modify the Constitution and proposes workable doctrines for implementing the key provisions of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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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