New Books in Public Policy

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds...

Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, explores the rise of a specific type of political leader and what this means for our politics. The book works through debates over the existence o...

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin. The author proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet so...

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Ste...

Over two million Americans are currently in prison or jail. Another 4.5 million are on probation or parole. And nearly one in two Americans have a family member who is or has been incarcerated. Writing for those new to activism as well as seasoned organizers, celebrated criminal justice activist Raj Jayadev introduces readers to the groundbreaking idea of participatory defense, a community organiz...

In our pursuit of efficiency in the lower criminal courts, have we lost sight of quality justice? Through the critical examination of original stenographic data, Over-Efficiency in the Lower Criminal Courts: Understanding a Key Problem and How to Fix it (Policy Press, 2024) by Dr. Shaun Yates demonstrates how an English Magistrates' courthouse often pursued managerial efficiency to the detriment o...

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility. And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often ju...

This is part #2 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Last episode, the spill devastates Cordova, Alaska. In this second part, 12 Angry Alaskans, a jury of ordinary Alaskans picks up our story. They muddle through the most devastating, and most complicated, environmental disaster in US history. How would they decide the ca...

Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversity they so fervently recruited. And disadvantaged students suffered. Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality an...

In the 1970s, the Mexican government acted to alleviate rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions crossed into the United States to find work that would help them survive as well as sustain their families in Mexico. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. But as U.S. authorities pur...

It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–explains, at least in part, why it is we have such a weak and limited public welfare state. But what if that very premise is false? What if, to the contrary, a majority of Americans have sympathy for poor p...

The Search for Shelter: Writings on Land and Housing (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on the global population living in slums, which has increased from 1 billion in 2014 to 1.6 billion in 2018. The book also looks at the impact of neoliberalism on urban planning, the manner of organization and the struggles of the communities affected by these processes, the cultural and political decision-making pr...

After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists–including Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein. In...

In Pittsburgh, the elevation varies wildly, fluctuating 660 feet from highest to lowest points throughout the area and making it one of the hilliest cities in the United States. Throughout this unruly and physically challenging landscape, the city's first mass transportation system was built - a steadily expanding network of public stairways, locally referred to as "city steps," these flights of s...

Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom? In Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America (Oxford UP, 2023), Katherine Hempst...

Jessica Henry's Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened (U California Press, 2021) explores a shocking but all-too-common kind of wrongful conviction: wrongful convictions for crimes that never actually happened. Henry's meticulously-researched book sheds light on how the US criminal justice system makes it possible to convict people of nonexistent crimes. By traci...

The U.S. government's decades-long "war on drugs" is increasingly recognized as a moral travesty as well as a policy failure. The criminalization of substances such as marijuana and magic mushrooms offends core tenets of liberalism, from the right to self-rule to protection of privacy to freedom of religion. It contributes to mass incarceration and racial subordination. And it costs billions of do...

Despite global undertakings to safeguard the full enjoyment of human rights, culture, traditional practices and religion are widely used to discriminate against women. In Women’s Human Rights and the Elimination of Discrimination (Brill/Nijhoff, 2016), 17 scholars approach women’s human rights globally, regionally and nationally, combining the perspectives of public and private international law i...

Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable. In Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global...

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing belief that performance could provide job opportunities for...

Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Francine Banner is a fascinating cultural diagnosis that identifies our obsession with complicity as a symptom of a deeply divided society. The questions surrounding what it means to be legally complicit are the same ones we may ask ourselves as we evaluate our own and others' responsibility...

In Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today...

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (U Minnesota Press, 2024) a...

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and commu...

Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rather than confronting injustice itself. In Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH, offers an innovative vision for the future of health equity by examining the social...