New Books in Law

If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) physical violence—whipping, beating, branding, amputation, and killing—to one that uses confinement. It is a mark of our “civility” that we no longer “hurt” people to get them to do what we want; instead, we put them in jails and prisons. We sentence them to “do time,” that time being a period of confinement away from, well, pretty much everybody. In her thought-provoking book Sentencing in Time (Amherst College Press, 2017), Linda Ross Meyer examines “doing time.” What, she asks, does it really mean to “do time” and does “doing time” really do what we say it does? Her answers are, to say the least, disturbing. “Doing time” means being sentenced to meaninglessness (something humans don’t like at all) and, no, it really doesn’t do much good at all beyond removing potential malefactors from our midst for a period of time—no “reforming” is really accomplished. Her conclusion: the current penal regime, insofar as it is inhumane and ineffective, is badly broken. By the way, this is an open-access book. You can get it for free here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The contemporary moment has brought to the forefront the question of what constitutes an American citizen. The legal question in popular understanding stems from the Fourteenth Amendment and its use of birthright citizenship as a central identifier of what makes a citizen. In Dr. Martha S. Jones’ newest book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) skillfully demonstrates that by the time the amendment was passed, Black Baltimoreans had already personally conceived of themselves as birthright citizens because of their lived experiences in the antebellum era. By using the country’s largest free Black population as a proxy to discuss the performance of citizenship by Black Baltimoreans, Dr. Jones re-conceptualizes our understanding of what the politics of belonging meant for this very important antebellum Black community. Adam McNeil is a PhD student in History, African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Several years on from the death of Antonin Scalia, what is his legacy? What did he leave the Supreme Court and jurisprudence? In The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption (Yale University Press, 2018), Rick Hasen takes up the large task of answering parts of this question. Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Scalia was funny and rude and innovative. Scalia was disrupter on the court, as the book’s subtitle suggestions. Much of Hasen’s book wrestles with Scalia’s favored ways of interpreting the law, textualism and originalism. Hasen shows the impact of the turn to these approaches, both in specific court rulings, but also in the wider impact on other jurists. Hasen argues that Scalia’s legacy will be protected by the large numbers of lawyers and newly appointed judges who adopted his approaches, including the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Who benefits from mass incarceration in the U.S.? In her new book Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2017), Lauren-Brooke Eisen explain how, when and why the for-profit prison system emerged, the ways in which it functions throughout the criminal justice system today, and what we might do to improve it. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Ramon Harvey‘s new book The Qur’an and the Just Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) tackles a topic as big and meaningful as the title of the book suggests. What is justice? What words does the Qur’an use to explore the meaning of justice? How did the social context of the Qur’an exist in its time as compared with later time periods? To what extent does the Qur’an give specific guidance for realizing justice, and to what extent does it give more general principles? Dr. Harvey treats these questions and others as he guides the reader through his erudite yet accessible and clearly organized monograph. He draws smoothly from numerous modern and premodern thinkers and engages closely with the Qur’anic text throughout the book; the extensive glossary also aids in the reader in making sense of the material. Given the broad relevance of justice in the Qur’an to any number of fields, the book should interest not only Islamicists and Qur’anic studies scholars, but also political scientists, scholars of exegesis more broadly, and even a general audience. Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at ([email protected]). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronicles the movement and its impact on the political and legal struggle for civil rights for African Americans. As Schmidt explains, prior to the sit-ins the main civil rights organizations were fighting segregation primarily through the courts. The incremental pace of change frustrated younger activists, with four students at North Carolina A&T ultimately deciding to fight segregation through direct protest. Yet the lunch counter protests they inspired were viewed with considerable ambivalence by the civil rights leadership, who were doubtful that the counters could be compelled to accept black patrons under existing law. Their uncertainly was reflected on the Supreme Court, where the justices’ division on the legality of segregation in privately-run facilities ultimately left the matter to be resolved by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In 1962 Richard Nixon suffered a humiliating defeat in the California gubernatorial election, one that led him to declare an end to his career in politics. What followed was one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American history, one chronicled by Victor Li in his book Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win the White House (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018). It began with Nixon’s move to New York immediately after his defeat, one that Li notes placed him in the economic and media capital of the nation. He soon became a partner at a longtime Wall Street law firm, for which the political contacts he developed during his time in public office garnered considerable business. Yet Nixon remained involved in politics, working behind the scenes at the 1964 Republican convention and campaigning for Republican candidates throughout 1965 and 1966. As Li demonstrates, Nixon’s work at the firm not only earned him a sizable income, but it also provided him with key staffers for his successful 1968 presidential campaign and even an opportunity to test out some of the issues on which he would run. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The recent Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling showed the on-going debate between religious conservatives and advocates of LGBTQ rights. Much of this debate has been about the definition of religious freedom and how to balance religious rights against other important individual rights. This is the topic of the new book The Rhetoric of Religious Freedom in the United States (Lexington Books, 2017). Eric Miller has brought together over a dozen scholars to consider the language used to argue over these rights claims. Chapters focus on everything from Conservative Evangelicals to environmental policy to Fundamentalists response to Donald Trump. Eric C. Miller is assistant professor of communication studies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today. The central concepts with which his theory of justice begins are now components of the philosophical vernacular: The Original Position, Veil of Ignorance, Primary Goods, and his Two Principles of Justice (especially the Difference Principle) all will be well known to the majority of professional philosophers. It is less commonly acknowledged that the apparatus just referenced is but the beginning of his theory, and not its ultimate concern. Throughout his work, Rawls is attempting to address a fundamental philosophical question: Can a society committed to the freedom and equality of its citizens yet arrange social institutions in a way that reliably cultivate within persons the attitudes and dispositions required for social justice? In John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge UP, 2017), William A. Edmundson argues that Rawlsian justice calls for a socialist economic order. Could it be that America’s premiere political philosopher was a socialist? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris counsels Democrats to disregard procedural precedents and niceties, and pugnaciously wield power in his book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics (Melville House, 2018). As Faris explains in this interview, he doesn’t mean Democrats should run smear campaigns against Republican candidates. He proposes creative and aggressive rules changes within the structure of Constitution. For example, he recommends Democrats scrap the legislative filibuster, end lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices and break up California into seven states to expand Democratic power in the Senate. Faris argues that the Republican denial of the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination proves that parties do not suffer political consequences from playing political hardball. Furthermore, he argues that his reforms would make democracy work better, and not erode trust in democratic institutions. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

It’s common to place the start of the War on Drugs with the Nixon or Reagan Administrations, but as Matthew Pembleton tells us, those are only phases II and III of a much longer drug war that began in the 1930s with the long-forgotten Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In his new book Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug Wars (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), Matt tell us about that agency’s history, the charismatic and controversial men who led it and served as its agents around the globe, and the ways in which the current opioid epidemic echoes an enduring pattern of drug use and misuse in the U.S. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Ian James Kidd is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Nottingham with research interests in epistemology, vices, epistemic justice, and illness. He is a co-author of the recently published The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Justice. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Jon D. Michaels, a professor of law at UCLA Law School, has written an argument in favor of the administrative state and against recent efforts to shift government functions to private contractors. In Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic (Harvard University Press, 2017), Professor Michaels contends that the administrative state of the New Deal and post-World War II periods was a state that rightly fulfilled state functions by having an administrative entity and its dedicated employees carry out regulatory functions, rule-making, and adjudication. Professor Michaels rejects the claim that bureaucrats are a threat to the proper functioning of government; and instead argues that they are experts that serve as a counterweight to politically motivated appointed agency heads. He sees in the modern administrative state a recreation of the separation of powers (legislative, executive, and judicial) that harkens back to the Founders’ concerns about consolidated power and tyranny. Professor Michaels sees the efforts to private state functions as endangering our democratic system of government by placing private actors in too powerful positions, wherein state functions are subordinated to the concerns of private actors, all to the detriment of the public. Professor Michaels addresses the politically contentious issues of the efficiency of public employees, private interests capturing public functions, and whether the modern regulatory state is constitutional. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and its evolution of it as a theory over the course of the 2,500 years since then. As he explains, what people think of as “classical Greek” democracy was primarily the Athenian concept of it, which was one of several versions that emerged during the Hellenic era. Though typically viewed as at its peak during the days of the Athenian empire, Cartledge sees the “golden age” of democracy as taking place in the 4th century BCE rather than in the preceding one, a shift which attests to the endurance of democracy as a governing system. It was during Roman times when the practice of democracy declined, to the point where it was often seen as a failed or impractical system during the Middle Ages. It was not until the 17th century when democracy staged a comeback in the West, with its advocates in the 18th and 19th centuries championing it as the best possible form of government – a status it continues to hold in the West even with the strains it faces today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Appeals to “press freedom” can be heard from across the political spectrum. But what those appeals mean varies dramatically. Sam Lebovic, in his excellent new book, Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Harvard University Press, 2016), traces the fraught history of that contested concept throughout the twentieth century. Beginning his analysis in the 1920s, Lebovic shows how conservative politicians, lawyers, and publishers began to define press freedom as freedom from state censorship, wrapped it in the first amendment, and fought New Deal attempts at regulation. Meanwhile, liberal politicians and journalists feared corporate control of the press as a threat to the democratic need for information, and advocated a freer and more trustworthy press. Not interested solely in the debates over press freedom, Lebovic also focuses on, what he calls, “the everyday politics of information.” He reveals how state classification practices and the political economy of the news fundamentally shaped how information flowed. It is an ambitious book that succeeds in telling a crucial story and it should inform contemporary approaches to press monopolization and the ever-growing “classified universe.” The book will interest intellectual historians, communications scholars, legal historians, political historians, and historians of U.S. foreign relations. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

​In The Talmud: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018), Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, associate professor of religious studies and law at Northwestern University, introduces the reader to the Babylonian Talmud, the most studied book in the Jewish canon. Professor Wimpfheimer focuses on one excerpt from the Talmud, showing how its reception, exegesis, and editing represents a process of reflexive critique and legal reasoning. ​A valuable text for scholars and general readers alike, The Talmud: A Biography helps the reader gain new appreciation for the Talmud as a dense tapestry of religious thought, philosophy, law, and ethics that continues to influence not only the Jewish religion, but religious and secular cultures and institutions worldwide. David Gottlieb will receive his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in June. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Stephen Riley, a lecturer in the Law School of the University of Leicester in Britain, has written a philosophical work examining the concept of dignity and its role in legal theory and, to a degree, the application of law. In Human Dignity and Law: Legal and Philosophical Investigations (Routledge, 2018), Riley argues that the role of human dignity should be recognized by courts and all of society, but he is wary of such a concept becoming a trump card in a court’s decision-making process. He notes that the concerns of justice and equality need to be recognized by courts but court must be aware of the infrequent instances when the demands of dignity are in conflict with the demands of justice. In this podcast we discuss the definition of human dignity, the author’s philosophical orientation, and the applications of the concept of dignity has been applied by courts in different settings. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments, advocacy groups and individual citizens are demanding that action be taken to protect their valuable data. But what does this sporadic noise amount to? B.J. Mendelson in his book Privacy: And How to Get It Back (Curious Reads, 2017) argues that a complacent citizenry and the overly-intimate relationship that corporations have with government has led to massive breaches of people’s privacy. Mendelson humorously explains the way people’s data is used and abused as he tracks the long history of government surveillance leading to an explanation of, what he believes, could be the solution to the abuse of people’s privacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America’s health care system: Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She begins with an account of the development of physicians’ practices in the mid-nineteenth century and traces the evolution of the American Medical Association’s role in shaping how physicians practiced medicine and how it was financed. The advent of the insurance model for funding health care was a creation of the Progressive period and became dominant in the late 1930s, during the New Deal. Chapin provides an account of the pitfalls of the insurance funding mechanism and recounts the battles between vested, competing interests, such as the AMA, independent physicians, corporate employers, labor unions, insurance companies (nonprofit and commercial), and the state and federal governments. Each of these entities shaped the health care system we have today. Chapin’s book helps explain how we got here and her critique of the insurance model suggests possible alternatives to our contemporary system of paying for health care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In her book, Ugly Prey: An Innocent Woman and the Death Sentence That Scandalized Jazz Age Chicago (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi presents the story of Sabella Nitti, an Italian immigrant arrested in 1923 an accused of murdering her husband. Sabella was found guilty and became the first woman in Chicago sentenced to hang. Through meticulous research into court documents and other public records, Lucchesi shares the riveting narrative of Sabella’s case. Situating Sabella in the 1920s, and looking at the ways in which this case shows how the legal system set up to defend her failed Sabella at every turn, Lucchesi’s book walks readers through the trial where there was no evidence and no witnesses, but reporters and the jury knew one thing for certain, Sabella must be guilty: she was ugly. Describing how the press, judges, and juries decided the guilt or innocence of women based on their looks, Lucchesi examines how Sabella’s fellow inmates such as Beulah and Belva were able to charm their juries into acquitting them. She examines the role of Helen Cirese, the young lawyer who lead Sabella’s appeal giving her a jailhouse makeover in order to be more credible. Told with deep description, Ugly Prey makes sure that the story of Sabella Nitti is not lost. Instead, it is one that shows how the present day American justice system is not dissimilar to the system of the past in the ways that gender, class, and ethnicity are impact how individuals are treated throughout the justice system. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice system as well as criminal ideas and practices underwent during the 1920s-1950s. For his most recent book, Pablo Piccato investigated spaces, actors, and fictions that shaped the complicated relationship between crime, justice, and truth during the consolidation of the post-revolution Mexican state. Through a series of compelling arguments, the author shows how impunity, the lack of transparency in judicial processes, and infamy are related to a constant quest for truth and justice that the state could not provide to Mexicans. From the abolition of the jury system in the 20s, to the emergence of crime fiction, the author shows that men and women, the press, detectives, policemen, and even murderers themselves, shaped both ideas and practices in regards to violence, law-breaking, and the normalization of injustice in the country. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University-NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The United States leads the world in incarceration. That’s a problem, especially the disproportionate impact of “mass incarceration” on low-income men of color. In their new book Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2018), Greg Berman and Julian Adler take us though a series of concrete, practical, and practicable steps that we could take to radically reduce the number of people we incarcerate while, at the same time, making our communities healthier and safer. Listen in. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How does the juvenile justice system impact the lives of the young people that go through it? In her new book, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Alexandra Cox uses interviews and ethnographic data to analyze the juvenile justice system and incarceration. While the book focuses specifically on New York’s justice system, the take-aways and Cox’s analyses are relevant for anyone interested in incarceration in general. Using the voices and experiences of those she interviews to articulate her findings, Cox points out that young people often suffer the most in systems of social inequality. She elaborates clearly on concepts and main take-aways through the book, from the idea that these young people are expected to mature within an institution, and how this impacts their development. Cox uses really powerful examples and pinpoints important concepts for us to think further about: the definition of worthiness (i.e. worthy of “saving”), being ungovernable (i.e. being uncontrollable), the idea of reformation systems as taking care of “other people’s children,” and the ethos of personal responsibly to youth who cannot even vote yet. The stories from the book show how it’s easy to get into trouble and very difficult to get out. This book will be enjoyed by Sociologists and Criminologists in general, but also by social workers, those working in the area of incarceration, in addition to anyone interested in developmental psychology within the context of incarceration. This book would be a great addition to any higher level undergraduate or entry level graduate course in criminology because of its clear organization and presentation of arguments. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Allison Varzally documents the history of Vietnamese adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Varzally adds to the growing literature on Southeast Asian Americans and on Asian international adoption by highlighting the distinctiveness of Vietnamese adoption for its liberal orientation and its expansive notion of kinship. Four chapters trace this history from its antiwar beginnings in the early Cold War; to Operation Babylift in 1975 and its controversial legal aftermath; to the federal legislation and social practices that shaped the “homecomings” of Amerasians in the 1980s; and, finally, to Vietnamese adoptees own attempts in the 1990s (and beyond) to find meaning in their journeys. Making ample use of oral history, Varzally tells stories that are both heart-rending and inspiring. They confirm that family formation was a central site of political contestation and protest in late twentieth-century America. Children of Reunion offers food for thought in contemporary debates over refugee resettlement and family reunification as a principle for immigration policymaking. Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The Amistad Rebellion is usually remembered as the only instance in which a US court sent re-captured slaves back to Africa. Yet as Sharla Fett shows in her new book Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), the Amistad case is not exactly unique. By using the stories of re-captured Africans in detention in places like Key West, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina, Dr. Fett examines how pro-slavery and abolitionist factions used re-captives to argue their respective cases. She also examines the lives of re-captured slaves sent to “back” to Liberia, a place they had never been. Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be PhD student and Colored Conventions Project Scholar at the University of Delaware. He received his M.A in History at Simmons College and B.S. in History at Florida A&M University. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Jonathan Daly is a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His newest book Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018), provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the criminal justice system in Russia from the 1700s to the present. Rather than following the typical narrative of Russia being a backwards, Asiatic state that struggled to modernize, Daly begins the book noting that “Russia developed as one of the most successful states in human history.” He highlights the achievements of the Russian state, such as the 1649 Ulozhenie, (which was one of the most detailed and elaborate law codes devised in the early modern world), Empress Elizabeth’s curtailment of capital punishment, the 1864 judicial reform (in which Russia became the first non-Western country to establish an independent judiciary functioning largely according to Western best practices), early Bolshevik criminal justice for regular (as opposed to “political”) offenders aimed at a level of humaneness rare in the world in the early 1920s and post-Soviet Russia’s enormous efforts to develop law according to international best practices. At the same time he rightfully notes Russia’s reputation as a despotic power with a weak rule of law tradition and asks how these contradictions evolved within Russia’s criminal justice system. In seeking to answer this question, Daly focuses on the continuation of strong personal, informal factors in Russian governance and the Russian preference for the rule of authoritative persons rather than of law to unify the practices of three ideologically disparate regimes. Crime and Punishment in Russia provides a clear, concise, and informative historical look at the evolution of criminal justice in Russia. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

When thinking of Title IX, most people immediately associate this important education policy with either athletics or a general idea of increasing opportunities for women in education. Rarely do those same people know how Title IX originated, how the role of Title IX changed over time, and how it contributes to what R. Shep Melnick calls “the Civil Rights State.” During the Obama and Trump administrations, Title IX has been involved with the recent attention that universities—and society writ large—have given to sexual assault and sexual harassment. As the public has demanded action to solve this issue in education, how to regulate this action through Title IX has proved to be a more difficult and controversial task. In his new book The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education (Brookings Institution Press, 2018), Melnick addresses these legal questions and looks ahead to the future of Title IX as we near the two-year mark of the Trump administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. In Raza Si, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Jimmy Patino narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence. By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patino fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patio tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an abolitionist position on immigration–going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate. Jimmy Patino is Assistant Professor of Chicano and Latino studies at the University of Minnesota. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, out in paperback May 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Today I talked to Fahad Bishara about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Bishara is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. In this podcast, Dr. Bishara discusses his sophisticated history that explores the intricate legal and economic regimes that traversed the Western Indian Ocean for generations. He also talks about how he effectively mined legal documents to craft this narrative. The following podcast was originally published on H-Law’s Legal History Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

“Native American” is unique among American racial categories in defining not just social status or historical lineage, but also an individual’s relationship to state and federal governments. In Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South (Oxford University Press, 2016), Mikaela M. Adams, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, tracks the histories of six Indian societies in the American South from the seventeenth to the twenty first centuries. In doing so, she argues that the question of belonging was often difficult to answer, particularly in a region where whites insisted on dividing the individuals along a strict, binary, color line. In Who Belongs?, Pamunkey, Catawba, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Miccosukee communities all grapple with the fundamental question of tribal membership. After colonization and conquest, the answer to the question posed by Adams could have critical and concrete consequences. Often, whether someone belonged to a given tribe determined fundamental questions of identity, financial restitution, and land ownership. Who Belongs? is a critical retelling of the Native south which emphasizes the fungible nature of group identity and the adaptations Native communities made to survive within a settler colonial system of state power. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Deondra Rose has written Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Citizens by Degree examines the development and impact of federal higher education policy, specifically the National Defense Education Act, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX. Rose argues that these policies have been an overlooked-factor driving the progress that women have made in the United States. By significantly expanding women’s access to college, they led to women to surpassing men as the recipients of bachelor’s degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically successful and politically engaged. The book focuses on how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. higher policy development during the mid-twentieth century, expanding opportunities for women, while maintaining discriminatory practices for African Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The Weimar Republic was home to the first gay rights movement, led by well-known sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. It also inspired many literary and cinematic representations of sexual liberation in legendary 1920s Berlin. In her ambitious book, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Laurie Marhoefer revises several assumptions about the sexual politics of Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. She examines how the sexual freedoms fought for by many reformers often came at the expense of a minority perceived as too non-conformist even by the left. Critically exploring explosive personalities, such as Hirschfeld and Ernst Roehm, and political turning points, such as the Venereal Disease Law of 1927 and the Vote on Repealing the Sodomy Law in 1929, this book demonstrates the profound ambiguities of the era. Marhoefer suggests that a Weimar Republic political settlement between diverse factions simultaneously saw emancipation of those who could claim a new respectability based on scientific reasoning and increased criminal control over the sexual lives of individuals who could not. Combining dynamic individual stories with several revisionist arguments, this book is one that will appeal to many listeners. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in August 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and whether it will continue to provide the voting rights protections it has in the past. In Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act (Stanford University Press, 2017), Jesse Rhodes, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, places the VRA into a political context. He aims to figure out the political puzzle of the VRA: Why, for fifty years, have both Democrats and Republicans in Congress consistently voted to expand the protections offered by the VRA, yet the act remains vulnerable? Why have Republicans consistently adopted administrative and judicial decisions that undermine legislation they repeatedly back? Rhodes argues that conservatives have pursued a paradoxical strategy which takes advantage of high and low salience. The conservative strategy, according to Rhodes, is to accept expansive voting rights protections in highly visible votes in Congress while simultaneously narrowing the scope of federal enforcement in low visibility administrative and judicial maneuvers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

True crime is as popular as ever in our present moment. Both television and podcast series have gained critical praise and large audiences by exploring largely unknown individual crimes in depth and using them to consider broader questions surrounding the justice system, guilt and innocence, class and racial inequality, and evidence. Rarely do we get to think historically about these broader topics through the lens of individual, especially unknown, cases in light of the challenges posed by researching historical crimes. Kali Nicole Gross, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University New Brunswick, has done incredible research to do just that in her new book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, Hardcover 2016, Paperback 2018). The book won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction. The book tells the story of the discovery of a torso, the investigation of the murder, and the life of the accused—Hannah Mary Tabbs. The body was discovered in 1887 and drew an unusual amount of attention in the segregated areas in and around Philadelphia, especially given the victim and accused were black. In this episode of the podcast, Gross discusses why the case caught the eye of the public and investigators at the time. She also explains some of the broader context and insights of the case. Finally, she talks about her research process. We don’t give away the resolution of the case in our conversation, but will introduce you to Hannah Mary Tabbs and the world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia in which she lived. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack effective political institutions as these have been undermined by neo-patrimonialism and clientelism. Scholars such as Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz have argued that Africa’s political culture is inherently different from the West and that African political system is actually working through what they term “instrumentalization of disorder.” While acknowledging some of the contributions that Chabal and Daloz have made to the understanding of Africa institutions, the contributions in this volume challenge this notion that political life in Africa is shaped primarily by social customs and not by formal rules. The contributions examine formal institutions such as the legislature, judiciary, and political parties and they show the impact of these institutions on socio-political and economic developments in the continent. Their contributions show that political and institutional developments vary across the continent and African states should not be treated as if they are the same. They argue that informal institutions have helped to shape and strengthen formal institutions. The authors of the different chapters are cutting-edge scholars in the field and they make a clear and convincing argument that formal institutions matter and that it is impossible to understand Africa without taking into consideration the roles played by these institutions. The book is edited by Nic Cheeseman. He is a professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham and was formerly Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University. He is the recipient of the GIGA award for the best article in Comparative Area Studies (2013) and the Frank Cass Award for the best article in Democratization (2015). He is also the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2015), the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politic, a former editor of the journal African Affairs, and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan’s African Progress Panel. Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria. For more NBN interviews, follow him on Twitter @bekeh or head to bekeh.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He has written for a number of popular publications including the New York Times, New York Daily News, USA Today, and the Nation. His newest book The End of Policing is out now from Verso press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday spent ten years interviewing criminal defense attorneys throughout China in order to compile the evidence on the professional lives of criminal defense attorneys in the one-party authoritarian state that is modern China. They present what they found in Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (Cambridge University Press, 2016) In this interview with co-author Sida Liu, we discuss the extreme difficulties faced in daily work by attorneys. From the Communists victory in 1949 until 1979, there was essentially no criminal procedural law in China. In 1979 the Deng Xiaoping regime sought stability and order and created the first criminal procedural law. Since then the law has been revised several times, giving more formal rights to defendants and their counsel, while simultaneously allowing for state harassment of defense attorneys should they too zealously do their jobs. Liu and Halliday reveal the methods of state officials to hinder the pursuit of justice for criminal defendants and their attorneys. In doing so, the authors not only reveal the dangers faced by attorneys but also reveal how dangerous the Communist regime considers this educated, motivated, and articulate group to be to the one-party state. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In 2013, when the Russian State Duma passed a law banning the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors, some rushed to boycott Russian vodka. In Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017), Dan Healey provides historical context for the law and cautions against the easy application of recent changes elsewhere. The Russian embrace of LGBT rights will be the result of cultural evolution from within society and not some off-the-peg downloading of a European formula, Healey writes. Decriminalized after the revolution, sodomy was re-banned under Stalin in 1933-4 and remained illegal until 1993. In a series of case studies, Healey examines same-sex relationships in the gulag, provincial criminal investigations from the 1950s, the diary of popular singer Vadim Kozin (who was sent to Magadan in the 1940s under the anti-sodomy law), gay cruising in Brezhnev-era Moscow, and pornography in the 1990s. What emerges is a complex portrait of gay and lesbian consciousness that belies Putin-era attempts to portray homosexuality as a foreign import. Healey also explores some of the difficulties facing queer history in today’s Russia, including a lack of information about prosecutions under Stalin and reluctance to include sexuality in the biographies of figures such as Kozin. The book concludes by examining current projects to mobilize queer memory, such as the Unstraight Museum in Belarus. Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status. This allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, in the more individualistic early modern England (1500-1700) landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority. This essentially excluded low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before. What effect do these phenomena have on one of the most significant social units: the family? In her new book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Daphna Hacker argues that the family is entering an important period of transition and instability in our bordered, global society. Families have been a legalized social category, but now competing legal doctrines and interpretations complicate the existence of this social category given the movement of people in a globalized society. How does secular law and family law impact families in multicultural countries with inhabitants from around the globe? Are pre-nups a good idea or a bad one? How does globalization influence reproduction in the family unit? How are current immigration debates intersecting with these changes to the family? Anyone interested in the law, gender, and globalization will find this book a great read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact, especially within polarized political periods. Reflecting the way this book examines both of these branches of government and the exercise of their respective powers, Investigating the President garnered two impressive book awards, from the Presidents and Executive Politics Section (Richard E. Neustadt Book Award) and from the Legislative Studies Section (Richard F. Fenno Book Award) of the American Political Science Association. Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler explore the precedent for congressional investigations into the conduct of and within the Executive branch, while they also amassed over 100 years of data surrounding congressional investigations to discern the impact of these kinds of investigations, even when they do not result, necessarily, in articles of impeachment or indictments of presidential appointees. Investigating the President notes the patterns of impact, from curbing presidential military engagement abroad to shifting the media focus and grabbing the narrative away from the president. The fascinating conclusion points to this under-researched area of congressional power and oversight that may have a more significant impact on presidential conduct and power than has generally been anticipated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (Yale University Press, 2016), Katrina Jagodinsky recovers the stories too often presumed lost in the silences of colonial archives: those of Indigenous women operating within systems of American law. In doing so, she argues that Indigenous women in the American southwest and Pacific northwest used Indigenous epistemologies, legal codes, and community connections, to navigate American settler colonial legal regimes and in some cases emerging victorious. Jagodinsky, an Associate Professor in the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, uses unique methodologies combining traditional legal history, poetry, and non-written knowledge networks to recount the histories of six women from the border regions of what is today Arizona/Sonora and Washington/British Columbia. Legal Codes and Talking Trees shows how even under ardently white supremacist power structures and within settler colonial societies designed to dispossess Indigenous communities, people not only straddled racial lines individually, but also made families that run counter to easy narratives. Jagodinsky’s book is a call to arms for historians and archivists not to take their academic privilege for granted, and to use innovative research methods to locate and retell difficult to find stories, even when the archives may seem as incomprehensible as the language of the trees. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Leon Wiener Dow’s most recent work The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers readers intimate, informative, and at times provocative reflections on halakha, or Jewish law. The author makes nuanced philosophical and theological observations on the ideas and actions that define a halakhic life, and grounds his ideas with rich personal anecdotes that are woven throughout. Wiener Dow’s lively, captivating style of writing draws the reader into his powerful discussion of the roles that community, language, tradition, and evolution play in the halakhic journey. Leon Wiener Dow received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University and rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Professor David Hartman. He is currently a research fellow and faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Israel. Robin Buller is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Typically the Jim Crow Era of segregation is understood as beginning directly after Reconstruction and going into the mid-twentieth century with the dual climaxes of the Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Movement in Montgomery, Alabama. What this narrative suggests is that Jim Crow was a southern phenomenon. Such a view is unfortunately ill conceived. Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), written by Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Associate Professor of History at Smith College, reshapes contemporary memory of when and why Jim Crow laws were enacted. In Colored Travelers, Dr. Pryor details how while antebellum-era Northern black abolitionists simultaneously fought to abolish slavery, they also pushed the limits of what citizenship meant by attempting to freely travel within it. They did this by challenging Northern Jim Crow laws set to undermine the mobility of black people in general, but this oppression hit black abolitionists most because of the mobility needed to reach their events. By using travel narratives, newspaper articles, and various primary sources of domestic and international black travel, Dr. Pryor explains why the pre-Civil War period was an essential training ground for the laws that would nationally become entrenched in the post-emancipation United States of America. Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A in History student at Simmons College in Boston, MA. He graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Fall 2015 with B.S. in History. Adam can be reached at @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

John Corvino is Professor of Philosophy at the Wayne State University in Detroit. His academic work focuses on topics in moral, social, and legal philosophy surrounding sexuality, gender, marriage, religious conviction, and discrimination. But John is also an active public philosopher who frequently participates in public debates over these topics. He produces and appears in a popular YouTube series of short videos devoted to the philosophical discussion of controversial topics. He is the author of What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, co-author (with Maggie Ghallagher) of Debating Same Sex Marriage, and.co-author (with Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis) of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, all published with Oxford University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of riots across Taiwan that became an international crisis for the Eisenhower administration and raised serious questions about the legal status of US military forces positioned around the world. In American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy (Kentucky University Press, 2017), Stephen G. Craft provides a multi-archival study of the causes and consequences of the Reynolds trial and the ensuing protests. After more than a century of what they perceived as unfair treaties imposed by Western nations, the Taiwanese regarded the special legal status of resident American personnel with extreme distrust. While Eisenhower and his advisers considered Taiwan to be a vital ally against Chinese communism, the US believed that the Taiwanese government had instigated the unrest in order to protest the verdict and demand legal jurisdiction over GIs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Jon Olafsson is Professor in the n the department of Comparative and Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland. His research is focused on democracy, political participation, dissent, reconciliation, and social criticism. Jon has written extensively about the efforts in Iceland – from roughly 2010 to 2013 - to revise the nation’s constitution. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Seth Barrett Tillman, an instructor in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in Ireland, is one of the few scholars to have researched and written about the history of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Prof. Tillman has also submitted amicus briefs (friend of the court briefs) in three recent federal cases regarding whether President Trump has violated the clause. In this podcast interview, Prof. Tillman discusses the historical origins of the clause, its original understanding during the early republic, and its possible application to the Trump presidency. In short, Prof. Tillman contends that the clause does not apply to elective offices; rather, it only applies to appointed offices in the federal government. Although conceding that there are good reasons to want such a clause to apply to the President, he contends that it is simply not a proper understanding of the clause to apply it to President Trump. Here’s some reading: Prof. Tillman and Josh Blackman’s New York Times op-ed on Trump and the emoluments clause. Prof. Tillman’s article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy on Trump and the emoluments clause Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law