New Books in Law
1,471 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 14 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of the Law about their New Books
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Episodes
Adrian Chastain Weimer, "A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
October 03, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesIn A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how, more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule. With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown's...
Derk Venema, "Supreme Courts Under Nazi Occupation" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
October 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDerk Venema's edited volume Supreme Courts Under Nazi Occupation (Amsterdam UP, 2022) is the first extensive treatment of leading judicial institutions under Nazi rule in WWII. It focusses on all democratic countries under German occupation, and provides the details for answering questions like: how can law serve as an instrument of defence against an oppressive regime? Are the courts always the guardians of democracy and rule of law? What role was there for international law? How did the cou...
Aparna Chandra, "Court on Trial: A Data-Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India" (India Viking, 2023)
September 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Indian Supreme Court was established nearly seventy-five years ago as a core part of India's constitutional project. Does the Court live up to the ideals of justice imagined by the framers of the Indian Constitution? Critics of the Supreme Court point out that it takes too long to adjudicate cases, a select group of senior advocates exercise disproportionate influence on the outcome of cases, the Chief Justice of India strategically assigns cases with an eye to outcome, and the self-appoi...
Aaron Tang, "Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court--And How We Can Fix It" (Yale UP, 2023)
September 30, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesToday I talked to Aaron Tang about his new book Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court--And How We Can Fix It (Yale UP, 2023). The Supreme Court, once the most respected institution in American government, is now routinely criticized for rendering decisions based on the individual justices' partisan leanings rather than on a faithful reading of the law. For legal scholar Aaron Tang, however, partisanship is not the Court's root problem. Overconfidence is. Conservative and ...
Traci Cipriano, "The Thriving Lawyer: A Multidimensional Model of Well-being for a Sustainable Legal Profession" (Routledge, 2023)
September 29, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesTraci Cipriano's book The Thriving Lawyer: A Multidimensional Model of Well-Being for a Sustainable Legal Profession (Routledge, 2023) is based on an innovative model, grounded in science. This book serves as a resource for promoting well-being and culture-change in the legal community by educating about pertinent issues impacting lawyers, and how to address them. It is a roadmap, highlighting the many over-arching and inter-connected aspects of well-being, and enabling readers to identify an...
Kashmir Hill, "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It" (Random House, 2023)
September 28, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesNew York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed ...
The Civic Bargain: A Conversation with Josiah Ober on Ancients and Moderns
September 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAmidst increasing acrimony and political strain, many worry that democratic governance has an expiration date. To answer these concerns, Josiah Ober looks to the ancients. Here, he discusses his recent book (co-authored with Brook Manville), The Civic Bargain: How Democracies Survive (Princeton UP, 2023). How did democracies like Athens, Rome, and England overcome the challenges that accompanied wealth and expansion? How did the ancients influence the American Founders? What lessons can they ...
Dylan C. Penningroth, "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2023)
September 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement. The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome pow...
Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)
September 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDo individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards argues that Americans in the South transformed their understanding of inequality during the half century following the Revolutionary War. Drawing ...
Megan MacKenzie, "Good Soldiers Don't Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
September 24, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesSexual violence is a significant problem within many Western militaries. Despite international attention to the issue and global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements highlighting the impact of sexual violence, rates of sexual violence are going up in many militaries. Good Soldiers Don't Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Megan MacKenzie uses feminist theories of 'rape culture' and institutional gaslighting to identify the key stories, m...
Kristin Surak, "The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires" (Harvard UP, 2023)
September 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOur lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price. As discussed in The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press, 2023) more than a dozen countries, many o...
James Greenwood-Reeves, "Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States" (Routledge, 2023)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWas the use of violence on January 6th Capitol attacks legitimate? Is the use of violence morally justified by members of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil campaigners? Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States (Routledge, 2023) addresses these issues head on, to make a radical, but compelling argument in favour of the legitimate use of violence in protest in liberal democracies. Grounded in theories of constitutional morality, the book makes the case that when sta...
Diana Rickard, "The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence" (NYU Press, 2023)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesThe New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Rickard examines how serialized crime shows became an American obsession. TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people—such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequalit...
David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)
September 21, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesRecall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast between the FBI’s work in the 1960’s to wipe out left-wing and Black protests and its efforts to cont...
Valentina Capurri, "Not Good Enough for Canada: Canadian Public Discourse Around Issues of Inadmissibility for Potential Immigrants with Diseases And/Or Disabilities" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
September 20, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesValentina Capurri's book Not Good Enough for Canada: Canadian Public Discourse Around Issues of Inadmissibility for Potential Immigrants with Diseases And/Or Disabilities (U Toronto Press, 2020) investigates the development of Canadian immigration policy with respect to persons with a disease or disability throughout the twentieth century. With an emphasis on social history, this book examines the way the state operates through legislation to achieve its goals of self-preservation even when s...
David B. Wong, "Moral Relativism and Pluralism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
September 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to David B. Wong about his book Moral Relativism and Pluralism (Cambridge UP, 2023). The argument for metaethical relativism--the view that there is no single true or most justified morality--is that it is part of the best explanation of the most difficult moral disagreements. The argument for this view features a comparison between traditions that highly value relationship and community and traditions that highly value personal autonomy of the individual and rights. It is held...
Beverley Chalmers, "Child Sex Abuse: Power, Profit, Perversion" (Grosvenor House, 2022)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesChildren of all ages are abused in every country in the world, by members of every society, culture, religion, and socio-economic class. About 120 million children under twenty, or one child in ten, report sexual abuse. We often blame children for their own abuse instead of holding the perpetrators responsible for their crimes. When perpetrators are prosecuted, punishments are rarely severe. Remarkably, we sometimes justify child sex abuse, or even facilitate it, allowing it to continue, not ...
Anthony B. Sanders, "Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
September 13, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesListing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and free exercise of religion, plus a handful of others. However, we do not need to enumerate every liberty because there is another way to protect them: an "etcetera clause." It states that there are other rights beyond those specifically listed: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of ...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Aleksandra Nicole Pfau, "Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)
September 11, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesThe concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Pfau, Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners so...
Postscript: How Firearms Fuel Domestic Violence in the US
September 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2019, nearly two-thirds of domestic violence homicides in the United States were committed with a gun. On average, three women are killed by a current or former partner every day in the United States. Between 1980 and 2014, more than half of women killed by intimate partners were killed with guns. Domestic violence affects children, friends, neighbors, peace officers, the abusers themselves, and society as a whole. This fall, the United States Supreme Court will hear a Second Amendment cas...
Tiantian Zheng, "Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
September 10, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesBased on ethnographic research with victims of intimate partner violence since 2014, Tiantian Zheng's Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China (Bloomsbury, 2022) brings to the forefront women's experiences of, negotiations about, and contestations against violence, and men's narratives about the reasons for their violence. Using an innovative methodology - online chat groups, it foregrounds the role of history, structural inequal...
Tomaz Jardim, "Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the 'Bitch of Buchenwald'" (Harvard UP, 2023)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesOn September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich's most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the "Bitch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in "bestial" sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution re...
Yanna Yannakakis, "Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico" (Duke UP, 2023)
September 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke UP, 2023), Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources r...
Ben Mattlin, "Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World" (Beacon, 2022)
September 02, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World (Beacon, 2022), disabled journalist Ben Mattlin weaves together interviews and reportage to introduce a cavalcade of individuals, ideas, and events in engaging, fast-paced prose. He traces the generation that came of age after the ADA reshaped America, and how it is influencing the future. He documents how autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement upended views of those whose brains work differently. He lifts the veil on a thr...
Ari Ezra Waldman, "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
September 02, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesIn Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how t...
Marion Holmes Katz, "Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity" (Columbia UP, 2022)
September 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this interview, I speak with Marion Holmes Katz about her latest book Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (Columbia UP, 2022). This fascinating book explores the question of wives’ domestic responsibilities from a Sunni Islamic legal perspective, covering scholarship from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. The book addresses questions such as, does the wife have the obligation to provide housework? What counts as housework? And if it is true that the wife is not obl...
Sarah R. Coleman, "The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesSarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023) focuses much less on the often-discussed physical border between the United States and other countries, and more so on the internal touchpoints where immigration federalism takes place. Coleman does a number of things in this book, including providing a fascinati...
Who’s Afraid of the Catholic Integralists? (with Kevin Vallier)
August 31, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesKevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patienc...
Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
August 30, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesOwnership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar S...
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Knopf Doubleday, 2023)
August 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWith the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only bla...
Asad L. Asad, "Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life" (Princeton UP, 2023)
August 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBecause immigration is such a recurring-and divisive-topic in the United States, it is easy to assume that we understand what it means for an immigrant to live under the specter of surveillance and punishment. It is easy to assume, as many scholars and journalists do, that undocumented immigrants live on the run from the authorities, constantly fleeing to the margins of daily life, staying in the shadows beneath the eyes of the law. And yet, while it is certainly true that immigrants are cons...
Julian Jackson, "France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain" (Harvard UP, 2023)
August 27, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesThere was a time when French people put up picture of Marshal Philippe Petain on their walls. He is a figure of immeasurable stature to the country of France. Victor of Verdun, a one-time minister of war, and finally, a traitor to his country. Or was he? Did Petain allow the stain of collaboration to tarnish his reputation, or did he use his figure to guard the French people from worse Nazi atrocities during the Vichy era? The answer to those questions would divide France in the years followi...
Kalyani Ramnath, "Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962" (Stanford UP, 2023)
August 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFor more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British Empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 (Stanford UP, 2023) centers on the legal struggles ...
Chris Dietz, "Self-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender" (Routledge, 2022)
August 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSelf-Declaration in the Legal Recognition of Gender (Routledge, 2023) is a socio-legal study that offers a critique of what it means to self-declare with regard to legal gender. Based on empirical research conducted in Denmark, the book engages in some of the most controversial issues surrounding trans and gender diverse rights. The theoretical analysis draws upon legal consciousness, affect theory, vulnerability and governmentality, to cross jurisdictional boundaries between law and medicine...
Beverley Clough and Jonathan Herring, "Disability, Care and Family Law" (Routledge, 2021)
August 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDisability, Care and Family Law (Routledge 2021) examines the issues at the intersection of disability, care and family law. Professors Beverley Clough and Jonathan Herring challenge dominant narratives in family law, which disadvantage people with disabilities. The book enables the questioning of structural norms in policy and society which situates disability as private familial concern. It calls to the forefront marginalised voices to unveil complexities in seemingly neutral laws when appl...
Postscript: Guns, Violence, and the Law: How Federal Courts are Trying to Figure Out the Second Amendment
August 22, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesTwo blockbuster cases came down in June of 2022. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen substantially expanded Second Amendment rights and limited the power of states to regulate concealed carry of firearms. Bruen affected thousands of Americans who have had their laws overturned and radically changed the method by which federal judges evaluate firearms law. Two remarkable scholars of the Second Amendment and firearms law explain how l...
Morgan L. W. Hazelton et al., "The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 21, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesDoes it matter if judges are nice to each other? The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary (Oxford UP, 2023)argues that how judges interact with each other has an important effect at every stage of their judicial process. Previously, scholars have explained judicial behavior in terms of the law, the ideological attitudes of the judges, external and internal constraints, and the background characteristics of the judges, such as gender, race, or prior professional ...
Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, "We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care" (Penguin, 2023)
August 21, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesFew of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically releva...
Becoming Justice Thomas
August 20, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesOn today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Season 8 of Slow Burn, titled, Becoming Justice Thomas. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History...
Lauren S. Foley, "On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies" (NYU Press, 2023)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesDiversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and universities. In On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies (NYU Press, 2023), Lauren S. Foley sheds light on our current crisis, exploring the past, present, and future of this contentious policy. From Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-twentieth century to the current Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvar...
Scott Skinner-Thompson, "Privacy at the Margins" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 16, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesLimited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins (Cambridge UP, 2021), Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance regimes - furthering equality goals - and demonstrates why efforts undertaken by vulnerable groups (...
Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesBenjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the (usually negative) effects of neoliberal capitalism, writing about NGOs, labor leaders, and healt...
Sara Beam, "Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
August 14, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two young children: her own illegitimate daughter and the son of a rural wet nurse. So begins a harrowing criminal trial during which authorities interrogate Jeanne Catherine several times, sometimes with torture, to determine the truth. Sara Beam's The Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva (University of Toronto Press, 2021) is a suspenseful historical mystery that offers stu...
Len Niehoff and Thomas Sullivan, "Free Speech: From Core Values to Current Debates" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy do we protect free speech? What values does it serve? How has the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment? What has the Court gotten right and wrong? Why are current debates over free expression often so divisive? How can we do better? In this succinct but comprehensive and scholarly book, authors Len Niehoff and Thomas Sullivan tackle these pressing questions. Free Speech: From Core Values to Current Debates (Cambridge UP, 2022) traces the development and evolution of the free spee...
Postscript: Protecting the Public? Guns, Intimate Partner Violence, and the US Supreme Court
August 07, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesPostscript invites scholars to react to contemporary political events and today’s podcast welcomes an expert on domestic violence and firearms law to analyze a controversial Second Amendment case that the United States Supreme Court will hear this Fall, United States v. Rahimi. Kelly Roskam, JD is the Director of Law and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. She studies the constitutional implications of, advocates for, and works to improve the implementat...
Sharon Thompson, "Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women's Association and Family Law" (Hart Publishing, 2022)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesThis book tells the untold story of the Married Women's Association. Unlike more conventional histories of family law, which focus on legal actors, it highlights the little-known yet indispensable work of a dedicated group of life-long activists. Formed in 1938, the Married Women's Association took reform of family property law as its chief focus. The name is deceptively innocuous, suggesting tea parties and charity fundraisers, but in fact the MWA was often involved in dramatic confrontation...
The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesThe expansion of space travel is much discussed but always seems subject to delay. Why is that and when will it happen on a much larger scale? Douglas Ligor has been considering that issue for the Rand corporation – and he talks to Owen Bennett-Jones about the prospects for space travel. Ligor is co-author of Assessing the Readiness for Human Commercial Spaceflight Safety Regulations (Rand, 2023) and International Space Traffic Management: Charting a Course for Long-Term Sustainability (Rand,...
Cause Lawyering and Human Rights in Indonesia
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesWhy have issues of human rights become so contentious in Indonesia, 25 years after the much-heralded post-Suharto democratic transition? What kind of role has the Indonesian Foundation of Legal Aid Institutes, or LBH, performed in this field? Should those working on human rights try to work with governments and power-holders, or adopt an oppositional stance towards them? Timothy Mann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and recently completed his PhD on Indon...
Talking Clarence Thomas: A Conversation with Amul Thapar
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesAs the last few months of landmark Supreme Court decisions have showcased, Clarence Thomas is one of the most important men in America. To wrap up our Summer of Law series, Judge Amul Thapar discusses his recent book, The People's Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him (Regnery Publishing, 2023), digging into Justice Thomas's judicial legacy and some of his most interesting, influential, and surprising decisions. Amul Thapar is serves as a judge on the United...