New Books in Law

Nada Moumtaz’s God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021) is an ethnography anchored in deep study of the Muslim scholarly tradition, the urban landscape, and Lebanon across the Ottoman, Mandate, and post-independence periods. At the center of the book is the waqf, often translated as “pious endowment.” An act and a practice exhibiting or embodying...

In Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States (Cornell UP, 2021), David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution--a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-s...

Dr. Robert J. Spitzer’s classic text, The Politics of Gun Control: 8th Edition (Routledge, 2020), has been revised based on new data on gun ownership and use. Dr. Spitzer insightfully interrogates the impact of gun politics on the 2018 elections, new research on the history of American gun laws, and controversies over the geography of guns -- where and when they can be carried and whether they can...

Hate speech can happen anywhere - in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, "Jews will not replace us"; in Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to target the Muslim Rohingya; in Cape Town, South Africa, where a pastor called on ISIS to rid South Africa of the "homosexual curse." In person or online, people wield language to attack others for their race, national origin,...

Political Scientist John Dearborn’s new book, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (U Chicago Press, 2021), weaves together three connected threads in the course of his analysis: the role and capacity of ideas to make political change, the evolution of the position and understanding of the President of the United States as a representative of the citizens of the United States, an...

Mental Health: Policies, Laws and Attitudes is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Elyn Saks, Orrin B. Evans Distinguished Professor of Law, and Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at USC. During this wide-ranging conversation Elyn Saks candidly shares her personal experiences with schizophrenia and discusses the intersection of la...

Dilek Kurban’s Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey's Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) engagement with Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict. Tracing the legal mobilization of Kurdish people alongside legal and political histories, Kurban’s work highlights the factors enabling ongoing violence in the K...

Christine Schwöbel-Patel's Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a critical study of efforts to 'sell' global justice. The book offers a new reading of the rise of international criminal law as the dominant institutional expression of global justice, linking it to the rise of branding. The political economy analysis employed highlight...

The American media has been focused on the Supreme Court’s upcoming abortion cases but a decision in a critical Second Amendment case could overturn public safety laws for 25% of Americans. Next week, the Court will hear arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a challenge to a 1911 New York State law that limits carrying guns outside the home. New York is a “may issue” sta...

European Decadence, a controversial artistic movement that flourished mainly in late-nineteenth-century France and Britain, has inspired several generations of Chinese writers and literary scholars since it was introduced to China in the early 1920s. Translated into Chinese as tuifei, which has strong hedonistic and pessimistic connotations, the concept of Decadence has proven instrumental in mult...

In Political Science, we are very familiar with the work of scholars who try to unpack why the ERA failed to get the required states. But Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963 published by the University of Nebraska in 2021 interrogates how earlier debates on the ERA transcended traditional political divides and ultimately redefined the concept of c...

Professor Anna Spain Bradley "wrote this book to be accessible to anyone, because international law is for everyone." In this important book, Professor Anna Spain Bradley explores human choice in international law and political decision making. Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) investigates the neurobiological processes which shape human choice in the framework o...

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, th...

Criminal Justice: An Examination is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Julian Roberts, Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford. Julian Roberts is an international expert on sentencing throughout the common-law world and is strongly involved in connecting scholars with practitioners as well as promoting greater public understanding of sentencing. This th...

In 2015, the world witnessed an Irish social revolution. In a historic referendum vote, the Republic of Ireland voted to extend the constitutional right to marriage to same-sex couples. Thirty years before, sex between men was illegal. From the 1970s, LGBT rights activists advocated tirelessly for decriminalization, fair treatment laws, protection from discrimination, and, most recently, marriage...

In his new book International Courts and Mass atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Ivor Sokolić explores the effects of international and national transitional justice in Croatia, and in particular the consequences of the work of the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY. Sokolić casts a critical analytical gaze...

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: The field of reproductive health studies The data on contraceptive access and effectiveness [even when used correctly] Why we need to trust women What happens when a pregnant person seeking an abortion is turned away The long-term outcomes for people who have had abortions The consequences for people denied abortions A discussion of...

Called the “quarterback of the new anti-drug movement,” Kevin Sabet received his Ph. D. in social policy from the University of Oxford and has worked in drug policy for over two decades. He’s served as an advisor for three presidential administrations, Pope Francis and the United Nations, and in 2013 he founded the group he still leads, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, better known as SAM, which opp...

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –1797) was one of the most important moral philosophers and political theorists ever. Her writings on liberty and equality have been embraced by thinkers both in her own day and since her early death. Lionized by feminists and demonized by others as dangerous and a loose woman to boot, Wollstonecraft produced a small but powerful, persuasive corpus. But a major aspect of...

As the foundational text of the Oral Torah in Judaism, the Mishnah is generally analyzed to understand Jewish law and the workings of the halakhic system. But Yakov Nagen, in looking at over two hundred mishnayot, identifies fascinating literary devices employed by the Sages to convey a deeper meaning, even the Mishnah's 'inner spirit.' Join us as we talk with Yakov Nagen about his work, The Soul...

The phrase, “state of nature”, has been used over centuries to describe the uncultivated state of lands and animals, nudity, innocence, heaven and hell, interstate relations, and the locus of pre- and supra-political rights, such as the right to resistance, to property, to create and leave polities, and the freedom of religion, speech, and opinion, which may be reactivated or reprioritised when th...

J.C. Salyer’s Court of Injustice: Law Without Recognition in U.S. Immigration (Stanford UP, 2020) is an important look at the histories and processes of immigration law in the US. The book engages with US immigration policy by both tracing the history of US immigration law in the US and considering contemporary practices. Not just a history of law or assessment of policy, Court of Injustice is eth...

A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour On February 23, 2016, Shawna Lynn Jones stepped into the brush to fight a wildfire that had consumed ten acres of terrain on a steep ridge in Malibu. Jones carried fifty pounds of equipment and a chainsaw to help contain the blaze. As she fired up her saw, the earth gave...

In May 2021, a landmark court order from a district court in the Netherlands ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, one of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, needs to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030. How did a court in the Netherlands pass a ruling on a global company? Does the Paris Agreement hold for transnational private entities like Shell? What does this mean for corporations goin...

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's decision to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, set off a chain of events that culminated in the only prosecution undertaken in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the decades since Garrison captured headlines with this high-profile legal spectacle, historians, conspiracy advocates, and Hollywood directors alike have fixated on how a New Orleans–bas...