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
James Q. Whitman, “The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War” (Harvard UP, 2012)
April 29, 2013 15:15 - 42 minutesJames Whitman wants to revise our understanding of warfare during the eighteenth century, the period described by my late colleague and friend Russell Weigley as the “Age of Battles.” We commonly view warfare during this period as a remarkably restrained affair, dominated by aristocratic values, and while we recognize their horrors for the participants, we often compare battles to the duels those aristocrats fought over private matters of honor. Not true, claims Whitman, who argues instead th...
Andrew Koppelman, “The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform” (Oxford UP, 2013)
April 24, 2013 13:09 - 58 minutesEvery hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the economy in the near term more than any court case ever had. The substance of the case, and its lasting legal implications, are the subject of Andrew Koppelman’s The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform (Oxford University Press, 2012). The plaintiffs in the “Obamacare” case, NFIB ...
Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez, “Math on Trial” (Basic Books, 2013)
March 13, 2013 17:52 - 1 hourYou may well have seen “Numb3rs,” a TV show in which mathematicians help solve crimes. It’s fiction. But, as Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez show in their eye-opening new book Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Court Room (Basic Books, 2013) math does play a role in criminal prosecution. Alas, it’s often bad math and, as such, often leads to bad outcomes: people get off who shouldn’t and others get convicted who shouldn’t. Schneps and Colmez show how math has been misused ...
Daniel McCool, “The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act” (Indiana UP, 2012)
February 27, 2013 19:24 - 22 minutesDaniel McCool, professor of political science at the University of Utah, is the editor of The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (Indiana University Press, 2012). The VRA was one of the center pieces of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s. The Act aimed to address great inequities in access to and participation in voting, particularly among African Americans. Perhaps most controversially, the law labeled a handful of states that were deemed ...
Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help” (Basic Books, 2012)
February 22, 2013 13:50 - 1 hourIn their book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012), Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. present the following big idea: race preferences in higher education harm those preferred. Their argument is interesting in that it is not premised on the idea that racial preferences are unfair. Rather, they crunch the numbers and show that when good minority students are placed among elite students at elite scho...
Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012)
September 13, 2012 13:46 - 1 hourExtraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and understandings of power. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) uses a trans-regional and transnational focus to explore the history of extraterritoriality and the treaty port system in nineteenth century societies. Eschewing the kinds of teleological...
Barry Kernfeld, “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
May 17, 2012 14:43 - 1 hourHave you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet? In Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929 (University of Chicago, 2011) Barry Kernfeld fills us in on the history of disobedient music reproduction and distribution since, well, before the advent of recording technology. Along the way he discusses ...
David Ball and Don Keenan, “Reptile: The Manual of the Plaintiff’s Revolution” (Balloon Press, 2009)
May 01, 2012 14:22 - 1 hour“I am not smart. I invented smart to compel you to do what I want.” — The Reptile Any civil trial represents the culmination of many, many years of disciplined mental effort. Legal education generates learning, and the discovery process generates information.–Yet neither learning nor information can result in a verdict of liability. For that, you need a jury: and a jury operates, by design, on very different principles of decision-making. As Rebecca West wrote, “The whole point of a jury is ...
Lynn Stout, “Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People” (Princeton UP, 2010)
February 22, 2012 18:05 - 59 minutesLynn Stout‘s pathbreaking book Cultivating Conscience:How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton University Press, 2010) represents a much-needed update to the discipline of law and economics. Using current social science and discarding threadbare premises, it develops new methods for theorizing and deploying law in its real-life context — starting from the simple observation that, as a matter of scientific fact, people are often remarkably and demonstrably unselfish. In updating her own fiel...
James Unnever and Shaun L. Gabbidon, “A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and Crime” (Routledge, 2011)
September 15, 2011 15:03 - 1 hourIs comedian and cultural critic Bill Cosby right–that black youth suffer from a cultural pathology that leads them to commit more crimes than their white counterparts? Is the remedy to the high rate of offending by African American men the “shape up or get shipped out” perspective? Is there more to African American offending than poor parenting or lousy schools? James D. Unnever is the co-author (with Shaun L. Gabbidon) of the new book A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and...
Martha Minow, “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark” (Oxford UP, 2011)
September 07, 2011 02:23 - 47 minutesWhat can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its...
Rajshree Chandra, “Knowledge as Property, Issues in the Moral Grounding of Intellectual Property Rights” (Oxford UP, 2010)
August 04, 2011 21:03 - 1 hourCopyright is one of those topics over which even two saints disagreed. The legend has it that Saint Columba and Saint Finnian engaged in an argument as Columba had secretly, and without the latter’s permission, copied a Latin Psalter owned by Finnian. When Finnian found out about it, he requested the copy, but Columbia refused to give it back. Dermott, the King of Ireland, decreed “to every cow belong its calf, so to every book belong its copy.” In 1925 the former Assistant Register of Copyr...
Kimbrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, “Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling” (Duke University Press, 2011)
August 04, 2011 19:27 - 1 hourOne hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part of the new. In Adam Bradley’s seminal monograph on hip-hop lyrics, Book of Rhymes, legendary MC Mos Def describes his desire to participate in posterity: “I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted t...
Walter Olson, “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America” (Encounter Books, 2011)
May 01, 2011 18:37 - 42 minutesWhat kind of education are students at top American law schools getting? And how does that education influence their activities upon graduation? In Walter Olson‘s Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Encounter Books, 2011), the author, an economist and not a lawyer, looks at what is happening at our nation’s elite law schools, and its implications for citizens, businesses, and taxpayers. Olson, a Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, describes what he calls the cons...
Brandon L. Garrett, “Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong” (Harvard UP, 2011)
March 25, 2011 13:44 - 1 hourWrongful conviction is, both morally and practically, the worst mistake that society can inflict on an individual. From Franz Kafka to Errol Morris, from Arthur Koestler to Harper Lee, Western culture is deeply shaken at the prospect of the innocent person condemned. Outside of fiction, it used to be nearly impossible to prove a convict’s innocence to a level of certainty that could overturn the judgment of a jury: after all, twelve peers have found that it would be unreasonable even to doubt...
Charles Lane, “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction” (Henry Holt, 2008)
March 11, 2011 18:32 - 1 hourWhy did Reconstruction fail? Why didn’t the post-war Federal government protect the civil rights of the newly freed slaves? And why did it take Washington almost a century to intercede on the behalf of beleaguered, oppressed African Americans in the South? In a terrific new book, Charles Lane explains why. The Day Freedom Died. The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt, 2008) tells the tale of a little-known though remarkably important incident: t...
Noah Feldman, “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices” (Twelve, 2010)
March 03, 2011 19:07 - 1 hourFranklin D. Roosevelt promised the country “bold, persistent experimentation” to address the Great Depression – but for quite a while his ideas were a little too bold for the justices of the Supreme Court, who struck down many New Deal laws as unconstitutional. FDR had his day: over the years he replaced many of those justices with his own men, New Dealers who then, as judges, worked boldly with the Constitution. Irascible, ingenious, and remarkably uncooperative, the four justices in Noah Fe...
Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010)
August 27, 2010 16:49 - 1 hourClausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might well have said war (or at least that war) was the “continuation of politics by any means.” Hitler was terribly specific about this. The Slavs, he said, were Untermenschen (subhumans). The Communists were Judeo-bolschewisten (Jewish Bolsheviks). Soviet soldiers were keine Kameraden (not comrades-in-...
Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008)
April 04, 2009 02:36 - 1 hourMost everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, etc.). But fewer of us know about what might be called “Nuremberg East,” that is, the Toyko trials held after the defeat of the Japanese in World War Two. These proceedings generated few books, no movies, and therefore occupy only a minor place in Western historical memory. Thanks to Yuma ...
Laura Wittern-Keller, “The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court” (University of Kansas Press, 2008)
November 07, 2008 23:36 - 1 hourDid you ever wonder how we got from a moment in which almost everything on film could be censored (the Progressive Era) to the moment in which nothing on film could be censored (today)? From the Nickelodeon to Deep Throat? The answer is provided by Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski in their wonderful new book The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University of Kansas Press, 2008). You’ve probably never heard of “The Miracle” or the case it launched in 1949. It’s ...
Laura Wittern-Keller, “Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to Film Censorship 1915-1981” (University of Kentucky Press, 2008)
April 04, 2008 21:55 - 1 hourThis week we interviewed Laura Wittern-Keller about her new book, Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to Film Censorship 1915-1981. Both well written and extremely well researched, Freedom of the Screen takes the reader case by case through the history of film censorship in the United States. Dr. Wittern-Keller is a visiting assistant professor of history and public policy at the University at Albany (SUNY) and is also the recipient of the New York State Archives Award for Excellence in R...