Shows / New Books in Law
New Books in Law
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Law
Jessica Lake, "Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors…
- New Books in Law
Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, "By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates" (Columbia UP, 2025)
In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of…
- New Books in Law
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine
Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In…
- New Books in Law
Karin Wulf, "Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In eighteenth-century America, genealogy was more than a simple record of family ties—it was a powerful force that shaped society. Lineage: Genealogy and the…
- New Books in Law
George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of…
- New Books in Law
Matteo Gatti, "Corporate Power and the Politics of Change" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In Corporate Power and the Politics of Change (Cambridge UP, 2025), Matteo Gatti examines how corporations have taken on roles traditionally reserved for…
- New Books in Law
Simon Devereaux, "Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge UP, 2023) by Dr. Simon Devereaux provides the first comprehensive account of execution practices…
- New Books in Law
Zainab Saleh, "Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in…
- New Books in Law
Terence Keel, "The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence" (Beacon Press, 2025)
Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, capture…
- New Books in Law
Emilie Connolly, "Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States" (Princeton UP, 2025)
From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly…
- New Books in Law
Amanda G. Madden, "Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (Cornell UP, 2025) is a study of the practice of vendetta among the civic elites in…
- New Books in Law
A. Mechele Dickerson, "The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream" (U California Press, 2026)
An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century The US middle class was a product of state and…
- New Books in Law
Stephen Skowronek, "The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations? Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history…
- New Books in Law
Anna Sergi, "How to Recognize the Mafia Abroad: Critical Notes on ‘ndrangheta Mobility" (Policy Press, 2025)
The influence and spread of clans and families within the ‘ndrangheta - the Calabrian mafia - is international yet recognising their activities is not always…
- New Books in Law
Heather Smith-Cannoy et al., "Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
Human trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls…
- New Books in Law
J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)
In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists…
- New Books in Law
Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Category…
- New Books in Law
Chris Dietz, "Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender" (Routledge, 2022)
Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with…
- New Books in Law
David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia" (Watkins Media, 2025)
Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud…
- New Books in Law
Jason Isralowitz, "Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men" (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023)
In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was…
- New Books in Law
James Greenwood-Reeves, "Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States" (Routledge, 2023)
Was the use of violence on January 6th Capitol attacks legitimate? Is the use of violence morally justified by members of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil…
- New Books in Law
Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, "Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Origins and Contemporary Realities" (Speaking Tiger, 2025)
Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with…
- New Books in Law
Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of…
- New Books in Law
J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in…
- New Books in Law
Agata Fijalkowski, "Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial" (Routledge, 2023)
Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials…
- New Books in Law
Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new…
- New Books in Law
Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened…
- New Books in Law
Alastair McClure, "Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy…
- New Books in Law
Jonathan Sumption, "The Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law" (Profile Books, 2026)
Across the globe, democracy is in crisis - in the UK alone, it has been rocked by Brexit, the pandemic and successive attempts by governments to bypass legal…
- New Books in Law
Robin F. Hansen, "Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow" (U Regina Press, 2024)
With rigorous scrutiny and deep care, Robin Hansen's Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow (U Regina Press, 2024) offers crucial…
- New Books in Law
Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most…
- New Books in Law
Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most…
- New Books in Law
Joanna Siekiera, "International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region" (Routledge, 2025)
International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025) edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera uses an interdisciplinary…
- New Books in Law
Yan-ho Lai, "Legal Resistance Under Authoritarianism: The Struggle for the Rule of Law in Hong Kong" (Amsterdam UP, 2025)
Today I spoke with Senior Fellow at the Centre for Asian Law, University of Georgetown, Dr Yan-ho Lai (Eric) about his book, Legal Resistance under…
- New Books in Law
Negar Mansouri and Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín eds., "Ways of Seeing International Organisations: New Perspectives for International Institutional Law" (Cambridge UP, 2025
For decades, the field of scholarship that studies the law and practice of international organisations -also known as 'international institutional law'- has…
- New Books in Law
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships…
- New Books in Law
Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)
In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic implementation…
- New Books in Law
Elizabeth Chika Tippett, "The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace" (U California Press, 2025)
The field of employment law used to be called "master-servant law." Even if this term has fallen out of favor, a central truth has not changed: modern…
- New Books in Law
Philip Pettit, "The State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new…
- New Books in Law
Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency…
- New Books in Law
John A. Camacho and Zack Hamilton, "Sports Chaos: Exploring the Reasons Behind Expert Business, Legal, and Moral Decisions" (2025)
What happens when sports decision-making collides with business interests, legal battles, and moral dilemmas? Sports Chaos dives into the unpredictable world…
- New Books in Law
Arpitha Kodiveri, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests" (Melbourne UP, 2024)
In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationship…
- New Books in Law
David Garland, "Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. In Law and Order…
- New Books in Law
John Jackson, "Special Advocates in the Adversarial System" (Routledge, 2020)
Special Advocates in the Adversarial System (Routledge, 2020) uncovers the little known phenomenon of Special Advocates who represent the best interests of an…
- New Books in Law
Anand P. Vaidya, "Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India" (Cornell UP, 2025)
In Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India (Cornell UP, 2025), Anand P. Vaidya tells the story of the making and unmaking of India’s Forest…
- New Books in Law
Meg Groff, "Not If I Can Help It" (Rivertown Books, 2025)
Meg Groff's memoir Not If I Can Help It (Rivertown Books, 2025) recounts some of the most harrowing, infuriating, yet inspiring stories from Groff’s work as a…
- New Books in Law
Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)
While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs and…
- New Books in Law
Linda Upham-Bornstein, "'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender': Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression" (Temple UP, 2023)
During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of these…
- New Books in Law
Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, "The Construction of Witchcraft in Early Modern Denmark, 1536-1617" (Routledge, 2025)
Louise Nyholm Kallestrup joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Construction of Witchcraft in Early Modern Denmark, 1536-1617 (Routledge, 2025) This…
- New Books in Law
Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight…
- New Books in Law
Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50 percent…
- New Books in Law
Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)
AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how. AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated…
- New Books in Law
Robert C. Bird, "Legal Knowledge in Organizations: A Source of Strategic and Competitive Advantage" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Legal Knowledge in Organizations: A Source of Strategic and Competitive Advantage (Cambridge UP, 2025) offers a step-by-step guide on how to utilize the law as…
- New Books in Law
Elisabeth R. Anker, "Ugly Freedoms" (Duke UP, 2022)
Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be…
- New Books in Law
Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, "Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards" (Brepols, 2025)
Shipping Sculptures from Early Modern Italy: The Mechanics, Costs, Risks, and Rewards (Brepols, 2025) by Dr. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio focuses on enormous…
- New Books in Law
Rehan Abeyratne, "Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Democratic backsliding, culture wars and partisan politics in the past two decades has seen the regression of human rights protections in the courts and across…
- New Books in Law
Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India
How did India’s landmark Forest Rights Act come into being? And what difference has it made to the lives of historically marginalized forest-dwelling…
- New Books in Law
S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)
Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was…
- New Books in Law
Miranda Spieler, "Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories" (Harvard UP, 2025)
In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured…
- New Books in Law
Deepa Das Acevedo, "The War on Tenure" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
As academia increasingly comes under attack in the United States, The War on Tenure (Cambridge UP, 2025) steps in to demystify what professors do and to…