New Books in Law

Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. J. Laite's book Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization, and charts the complex dimensions...

Students of American history know that the framers of the Constitution were deeply concerned that the United States would founder on the shoals of mob rule. They designed a system meant to ensure rule by an elected elite, a republic rather than a democracy. While democratic elements have been introduced over the past two centuries, that basic structure still stands. In Open Democracy: Reinventing...

Giovanni Mantilla’s new book, Lawmaking under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2020), traces the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict, and explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 197...

On September 23, 1970, a group of antiwar activists staged a robbery at a bank in Massachusetts, during which a police officer was killed. While the three men who participated in the robbery were soon apprehended, two women escaped and became fugitives on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, eventually landing in a lesbian collective in Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of 1974. In pursuit, the FB...

Michael McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University Law School and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has written an examination of the power that the president has in the U.S. constitutional system. The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power under the Constitution (Princeton UP, 2020) presents a unique a...

From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish.  Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (New Press, 2019) is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injusti...

Today we are talking with Becca Andrews, a journalist at Mother Jones, where she writes about reproductive rights and gender. The story we discuss is “When Choice is 221 Miles Away: The Nightmare of Getting an Abortion in the South” and its follow up. Becca’s debut work of nonfiction, No Choice, based on her Mother Jones cover story about the past, present, and future of Roe v. Wade, will be publi...

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry--hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike--complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and exp...

In Campus Carry: Confronting a Loaded Issue in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2020), editors Patricia Somers and Matt Valentine lead an examination of the unintended consequences of campus gun policy and showcase voices from the college community who are grappling with the questions, issues, and consequences that have emerged at their respective institutions. While making the case that...

Victoria Canning and Steve Tombs' book From Social Harm to Zemiology: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2021) outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to arg...

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have known the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as a site of industrial production, a place to heal from disease, and a sprawling outdoor playground that must be preserved in its wild state. Less well known, however, has been the area's role in hosting a network of state and federal prisons. A Prison in the Woods traces the planning, construction...

How does the record industry work? In Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), David Arditi, Associate Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at University of Texas at Arlington, analyses the ideology of getting signed and getting a record contract to show the alienating and exploitative effects of the record industry on musicians and the makin...

Javier Guerrero's "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) is about the encounters of Colombian drug smugglers and the Colombian Navy, both in the open seas and along coastlines. Guerrero specifically examines the technologies involved in the War on Drugs, such as the narcosubmarines and patrol boats, the knowledge required to tr...

Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth cont...

Every good story needs a villain, and some of the early chroniclers of the pilgrim and puritan settlements found all they needed for this type of character in Thomas Morton. Peter C. Mancall tells the story in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale UP, 2019), in what reads perhaps like a historical legal thriller novel. Most of our...

Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often hailed as the best in the world, yet the public health emergencies of today often echo the public health emergencies of yesterday: consider the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 and COVID-19, the displacement of...

In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and ope...

Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019) both delivers on what promises and more: it gives practical and ethical guidance for mental health law practitioners, and applicable tools to apply the Mental Capacity Act 2005. It also provides the ethical and philosophical justifications for doing so. This...

Many people think prisons are all the same-rows of cells filled with violent men who officials rule with an iron fist. Yet, life behind bars varies in incredible ways. In some facilities, prison officials govern with care and attention to prisoners' needs. In others, officials have remarkably little influence on the everyday life of prisoners, sometimes not even providing necessities like food and...

In his new book Why Should We Obey the Law? (Polity Press, 2018), George Klosko, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, has provided an introduction to the competing theories behind why people should obey the law. What Klosko refers to as “political obligations” exist in all societies, but he seeks to reveal the different justifications for such obligat...

The laws that govern psychiatric treatment under coercion have remain largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. But this is not because of their effectiveness, rather, these laws cling to outdated notions of disability, mental illness and mental disorder why deny the fundamental rights of this category of people on an equal basis with all others. In Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coerci...

Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a detailed historical look at how copyright was negotiated and protected by authors, publishers, and the state in late imperial and modern China. In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s,...

An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence. An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship wit...

Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Mus...

In his majestic and magisterial new book Law, Empire, and the Sultan: Ottoman Imperial Authority and Late Hanafi Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2020), Samy Ayoub examines and demonstrates the entanglement of Islamic law and imperial political authority in the early modern period. Focused on the incorporation of Ottoman imperial authority and edicts in the late Hanafi jurisprudential tradition, this bri...