New Books in Law

Leading up to Mayday, the nationwide Day of Refusal, and Abolition May, Saronik talks with Sean Gordon about abolition as an historical movement to end the transatlantic slave trade and a transformative justice movement to abolish prisons and defund the police. The episode focuses on the relationship between absence and presence, destruction and reconstruction, in abolitionist narratives and thoug...

In China and the International Human Rights Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Rana Siu Inboden examines the evolution of China’s posture towards the U.N. human rights system since the early 1980s. The book examines in unprecedented details China’s role and impact on the complex negotiations between U.N. members over the International Covenant Against Torture and its optional protocol; the...

Political corruption remains … one of the most intriguing and challenging issues in social science research and public policy, perhaps because although it occurs in virtually all polities, its causes, patterns, and consequences often seem unique to each circumstance. – Cadres and Corruption by Xiaobo Lu (2000) Corruption is rampant in many authoritarian regimes, leading most observers to assume th...

Dr. Sofia Stolk’s The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror (Routledge, 2021) addresses the discursive importance of the prosecution’s opening statement before an international criminal tribunal. Opening statements are considered to be largely irrelevant to the official legal proceedings but are simultaneously deployed to frame important his...

In this account of the rapid erosion of liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and civil and political rights in Hong Kong, Mark L. Clifford's latest book provides an historically in-depth, vivid political analysis of the rapidly changing situation in Hong Kong. When the British ceased its period of colonial rule in 1997, and Hong Kong was returned to the governance of the People's Rep...

In Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal describes how narratives of 9/11 and the war on terror have been constructed over the last twenty years and the various ways in which they have justified state violence against Muslims. Hilal offers answers to many questions, including and especi...

Analyzing the spread and survival of Islamic legal ideas and commentaries in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean littorals, Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2022) focuses on Shāfiʿīsm, one of the four Sunnī schools of Islamic law. It explores how certain texts shaped, transformed and influenced the jurid...

Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (Columbia UP, 2022) combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field no...

Today’s Postscript uniquely engages abortion politics by addressing structural political issues (voter suppression, gerrymandering, dilutions of minority voting, obstacles to women registering their positions politically), inconsistencies in Justice Samuel Alito’s majority draft, the ascent of the medical profession, the intersection of race, gender, and religion, narratives of morality, the genes...

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveill...

Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative...

Mark V. Tushnet's book The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941 (Cambridge UP, 2022) describes the closing of one era in constitutional jurisprudence and the opening of another. This comprehensive study of the Supreme Court from 1930 to 1941 – when Charles Evans Hughes was Chief Justice – shows how nearly all justices, even the most conservative, accepted the broad premises...

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Nor...

In Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network, by the Women Who Uncovered the Shocking Truth (Ebury, 2022), five women discuss their experiences of being manipulated into serious long-term relationships with undercover police officers. Through detective work and campaigning, these ‘spycops’ victims uncovered a hitherto-unknown practice whereby police officers were deployed for multiple years...

In this timely book, award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger, Louisa Lim, weaves together Hong Kong's fraught political and social history with her own first hand account of the spirit of an indelible city. In her latest book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, published by Riverhead Books in April 2022, Lim reflects on attempts at the erosion of Hong Kong identity,...

Around the world, audiences in the mid-1990s watched the mass atrocities unfolding in Rwanda and Srebrenica in horror and disbelief. Emerging from these disasters came an international commitment to safeguard and protect vulnerable communities, as laid out in the R2P principle, and an international responsibility to punish perpetrators, with the establishment of the ICC. Raymond Kwun-Sun Lau's boo...

Legal precarity, mobility, and the criminalization of migrants complicate the study of forced migration and exile. Traditional methodologies can obscure both the agency of displaced people and hierarchies of power between researchers and research participants. This project critically assesses the ways in which knowledge is co-created and reproduced through narratives in spaces of displacement, adv...

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democraci...

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their...

Digital connections permeate our lives-and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is alarming how difficult it is to create rules for securing our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It (O...

It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and unjustly impacts Black and Brown individuals and communities. With postwar efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies, our era of mass incarceration reproduced the old logics of white supremacism that uphold racist capitalism in this new setting. These ar...

The attacks of 9/11 changed the course of the global counter-terrorism order which has entrenched a system of global governance. This institutional creep is arguably eroding national borders, spheres of domestic governance, human rights, and seeps into the daily lives of ordinary citizens in largely unforeseen aspects. Perhaps just as alarming, there is limited accountability on the part of either...

Although the era of the Enlightenment witnessed the rise of philosophical debates around benevolent social practice, the origins of European humane discourse date further back, to Classical Athens. The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights (U Texas Press, 2021) analyzes the parallel confluences of cultural factors facing ancient Greeks and eighteenth-century Europeans that facilitated the creation a...

NB: This interview contains explicit language. In Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis (U British Columbia Press, 2022), bioethicist and jurist Florence Ashley historicizes recent developments in bans on transgender conversion practices, explains the legal implications of various conversion therapy bans, and argues for implementation that comes alongside education...

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