New Books in Law

Professor Robert P. Burns of Northwestern University School of Law offers an insightful critique of the modern American criminal justice system in his new work Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American Criminal Justice (University of Chicago Press 2014). This interview explores the characteristics of Kafka’s “Law” and exposes where and how these characteristics exist within the American criminal justi...

It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by competing moral norms. There is also widespread agreement over the idea that promises made under conditions of coercion or duress lack the moral force to create obligations. Finally, although free speec...

This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a legal revolution with far-reaching cultural, political, and economic import. But as J. Douglas Smith argues in On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States (Hill and Wang, 2014),the early 1960s witnessed a comparable sea change in voting law that des...

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Joe Gabriel shows how the modernization of American medicine was bound up in the ownership, manufacture, and marketing of drugs. Gabriel unearths the earl...

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a landmark international agreement for healthcare: the World Trade Organization’s “Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” Cloatre takes seriously the idea of TRIPS as a technology in Bruno Lat...

Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of w...

Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great powers and small states that is necessary to create and enforce norms across the globe. The 1856 Declaration of Paris marks the precise moment when international law became universal, and is the template...

The US Census has been an important American institution for over 220 years. Since 1790, the US population has been counted and compiled, important figures when tabulating representation and electoral votes. The Census has also captured the racial make-up of the US and has become a powerful public policy tool with both data and clout, affecting a range of policies from segregation to affirmative a...

In Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Jothie Rajah tells a compelling story of the rule of law as discourse and praxis serving illiberal ends. Through a series of case studies on legislation criminalizing vandalism and regulating the print media, legal profession, and religion in Singapore, Rajah raises critical questio...

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing my legal history professor at Carolina Law, John V. Orth about his short story Self-Defense (14 Green Bag 2D Autumn 2010). Orth, who is well known for his more traditional legal scholarship, has made a powerful venture into fiction.  The story, which begins by describing an ordinary daily dog-walk, leads its reader into deep ponderings about the state of Am...

In Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Vintage Books, 2004), Melvin Ely uses a trove of documents primarily found in the county court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to unravel a rich story about the free blacks who inhabited “the gentle slope of Israel Hill.” The story begins in 1796 when Richard Randolph, a prominent Vi...

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. Banking on the Body: The Market in B...

Singapore has a well-deserved reputation as a state that stifles dissent and polices activism. But as Lynette Chua shows in Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (National University of Singapore Press, 2014), repressive government nowhere goes unchallenged, even if the forms that resistance takes are not manifest. Turning away from social movement theory that t...

Energy Law: A Context and Practice Casebook (Carolina Academic Press, 2014) by Joshua Fershee is a new casebook designed to better prepare students for practice than traditional methods of legal education. In this interview we discuss a brief history of energy law and delve into some of the topics covered in the book including: economic regulations and market structures, climate change law, and th...

Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological enterprise.  And yet when one looks at the ways in which judges have wielded epistemological concepts, there is plenty of room for concern. In Evidence...

Guy Chet, Associate Professor of early American and military history at the University of North Texas, in his book The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) makes a well-crafted argument for the persistence of Atlantic piracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the age of Blackbeard and Captain Ki...

Social media is a phenomenon that continues to grow and attract much attention in the form of consternation, commentary, criticism and scholarly research. Any attempt at truly understanding social media communication practices and tools requires interdisciplinary analysis, the examination of the technology from the varying perspectives of the groups of users, developers and experts with respect to...

In Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ovamir Anjum explores a timely topic, even though his focus is hundreds of years in the past. In order to present his topic Professor Anjum asks a series of foundational questions, such as: How have Muslims understood ideal government and political theology? What is the role of rulers in th...

Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford UP, 2014), by UC Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable, impels its readers to reassess the dominant methods of considering what is law. Constable’s study of law is informed by both philosophy and sociology; however, she avoids common approaches employed by both disciplines and instead conducts her legal analysis by searching for dir...

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period and makes a powerful argument that traditional understandings of the constitutional canon must be expanded to accurately reflect the American lawma...

My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple:  “!!!!”  Text speak, to be sure, but it conveys the surprise I felt. One can ask many questions about the trials of the German guards and administrators of Belzec,...

Most people say “I’m sorry” a lot. After all, we make a lot of mistakes, most of them minor, so we don’t mind apologizing and expect our apologies to be accepted or at least acknowledged. But how many of our apologies are what might be called “strategic,” that is, designed to do nothing more than placate the person we have wronged and essentially exonerate ourselves? In other word, how many of our...

Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown each discovered one case while they were researching other books, but when they began talking to one another, they realized the cas...

When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is prett...

Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author. Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. The book tracks the origins of philanthropy in America as a pact between the very rich and reformers. This was a movement that b...