New Books in Law

Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, two attorneys who have worked, respectively, in the Barack Obama and the George W. Bush Administrations, have written a blueprint of considerations to reform and revise aspects of the Executive Branch and the presidency. After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (Lawfair Press, 2020) joins a number of recent books—among them Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes’ Unmaking the Presidency, Stephen F. Knott’s The Lost Soul of the American Presidency, Lara M. Brown’s Amateur Hour—that assess the American Presidency, pointing out weaknesses in the structure of the office and the means to hold presidents accountable for their actions and decisions while in office. Bauer and Goldsmith come to their analysis from their perspectives and experiences working as attorneys at the highest levels of the Executive Branch and the presidency. They use these experiences to examine what they have seen transpire over the past four years of the Trump Administration, and the abuses of the office itself and aspects of the Executive Branch, particularly with regard to the Justice Department. This book looks at the institution of the presidency, while also exploring the way that Congress and the Courts work in relation to the Executive, providing a fairly comprehensive road map for reforms that can be done by a number of different political actors, including the next president.After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency really is a map or blueprint, outlining particular problems or controversial behavior by President Donald Trump and members of the Administration and/or Executive Office of the President staff, examining previous examples of the same kind of problems or behaviors, and then offering proposals for reform or revision that would address the problems or behaviors. After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency is divided into three sections, each section has particular focal points with regard to the presidency. Part one of the book focuses specifically on the president and advances proposals that, in many cases, would institutionalize and legalize norms that had been in place and adhered to by previous presidents, but not by President Trump. The second section, which is quite extensive, spotlights the relationship between the president and the Department of Justice. This part of the book proposes reforms that aim to keep the Justice Department independent of presidential interference and allows the Department to function and use its extraordinary tools and law enforcement capacities in a way that is free from corruption or inappropriate influence. The third part of the book is also the most difficult part in terms of reforms, since this section of the book treads into the area of presidential power that is long standing, and historically the realm of the Executive in the constitutional system. Bauer and Goldsmith note that they are committed to the idea of a powerful president, in line with Alexander Hamilton’s argument for an energetic executive in Federalist #70. But they also note that the president needs to be constitutionally accountable, thus their book aims at reforms that will institutionalize some of the guardrails that would contribute to more accountability without weakening the president or the presidency.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award-winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Joseph E. David, Professor of Law at Sapir Academic College in Israel, has written an intellectual history of the concept of belonging. David reviews the ancient Greek, Christian Biblical, Talmudic and Islamic conceptions of belonging and how such ideas have affected understandings of familial relations, marriage, and the political role of the family at different points in Western political history. His case studies range from the earliest Christian and, Jewish and Islamic discussions of legally appropriate family relations to the modern concerns with the public versus private status of the family in the liberal state. David also presents us with the options the modern liberal state has provided policy-makers who are concerned with autonomy and equality in the family.Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter : The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear: about the limits and the breadth of the first amendment, what to do when your free speech rights are violated, why having “free speech zones” on campus doesn’t work, and what you can do when someone else’s free speech is hurtful or offensive.Our guest is Will Creeley, legal director of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.Will began defending student and faculty rights for FIRE in 2006 after graduating from New York University School of Law, where he served as an associate executive editor for the New York University Law Review. He is a member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association and serves as Co-Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.Your host is Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. She credits her ability to read nearly-illegible things to a childhood spent trying read her dad’s handwriting. Christina’s dad was a public defender; human rights and how to defend them was dinner table talk nightly.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: First Things First: A Modern Coursebook on Free Speech Fundamentals, by Ronald K.L. Collins, Will Creeley, David L. Hudson Jr., and Jackie Farmer. "How to Respond to Richard Spencer," by Will Creeley, The New York Times (Oct. 19, 2017). Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order, by Joy Ann Williamson-Lott. "Fighting for Free Speech on America’s Campuses," by Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, The New York Times (Aug. 1, 2016).  FIRE's Tips for Student Activism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In the United States, gun violence is in a state of national crisis, yet efforts to reform gun regulation face significant political and constitutional barriers. In this innovative book, Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars put forward creative and practical solutions, proposing legislative reform which will reduce gun deaths.Theirs is a libertarian 'bottom-up' approach which seeks to empower those most at risk by allowing individuals a choice to opt in to common-sense gun regulation for themselves. At the same time, the genius of Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights (Harvard University Press, 2020) is that the proposals do not infringe the individual freedoms of gun ownership protected by the second amendment.Ayres and Vars put forward practical solutions which, where adopted, will cause an immediate reduction in lives lost as a result of gun violence. Their work is empirically grounded and provides a roadmap for legislators and policy makers who wish to keep people safe by reducing gun deaths.Ian Ayres is the William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller Super Crunchers. He is a contributor to Forbes, NPR's Marketplace, and the New York Times.Fredrick E. Vars is the Ira Drayton Pruitt, Sr., Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in mental health law. He works with numerous suicide-prevention organizations and is a member of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Gun Violence.Jane Richards is in the final stages of completing her doctoral thesis on the application of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the insanity defence and its disposition orders at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he drew from that experience. As a veteran of the First World War, Fraenkel survived the initial purge resulting from the implementation of measures designed to bar Jews from practicing law in the Third Reich. Though his legal practice suffered, Fraenkel persisted in defending people prosecuted by the Nazis, and enjoyed success in a number of cases. While the increased restrictions and growing reach of the police state ultimately forced Fraenkel to emigrate in 1938, his experiences as a lawyer played a major role in the development of the “dual state” theory of dictatorship, the only analysis of totalitarianism written from within Nazi Germany and the cornerstone of Fraenkel’s contributions to the field of political science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

My guest today, author Mithu Sanyal, describes the topic of rape as a ‘cultural sore spot,’ one that requires yet eludes wide conversation. Her latest book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (Verso, 2019), bravely starts this conversation. It covers the history of rape as well as of our divergent and misguided conceptions for it, and it addresses the topic’s intersection with matters of gender stereotypes and racism. We unpack these topics in our interview, along with the psychological phenomena undergirding conflicts over consent and body sovereignty. This episode will be of interest for anyone interested in the problems of sexual violence and gender bias.Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning broadcaster, academic, and author based in Dusseldorf. Her prior book, Vulva, has been translated into five languages.Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Kimberley Brownlee, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, has written a monograph addressing her argument in favor a right against social deprivation. In Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford UP, 2020), Professor Brownlee contends that all humans have basic needs for human interaction. Since such needs are fundamental for survival, they should be regarded as a human right. Social interaction is not a right to “love” or “friendship”, but rather a right to basic opportunities to interact with other humans. Although Professor Brownlee’s argument is most easily applicable to institutional settings wherein people are frequently deprived of human interaction, such as solitary confinement in prisons or isolation in hospitals, this right is generally applicable to a wide array of contexts in which people find themselves isolated from others.Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions such as whether to have children and how and when they wish to die. What could possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be in control of his or her own body and fate to the greatest extent possible and with the least intrusion by either the state or “outdated” social mores?But there is a dark side to expressive individualism when one enters the realm of public bioethics. In his 2020 book What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2020), O. Carter Snead defines for us what the term “public bioethics” encompasses and provides a much-needed genealogy of the field.He profiles key players in many of the most momentous bioethics-related developments of the post-WWII era from physicians such as Henry Knowles Beecher to jurists like Harry Blackmun and influential scholars in fields such as philosophy and sociology like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah.Snead chronicles how the field of bioethics came to be shaped by shocking revelations of cases of inhumanity many of which are well-known (such as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study) but many of which are rarely discussed such as medical experiments performed on near-term alive aborted babies. Such cases shocked the public and led to legislation creating commissions and other bodies designed to prevent such horrors.But Snead argues that much of the action on the public policy front failed for multiple reasons and left vulnerable groups (e.g., the aged, the cognitively disabled, the unborn) outside a legal regime built upon the precepts of expressive individualism. And even those who were supposedly able to express their wishes were often harmed by the expressive individualism paradigm and its legal framework. Snead gives examples of the many actors in the area of assisted reproduction and assisted suicide whose rights can be trampled in the name of a notion of personal liberty that does not account for changes of mind. He also demonstrates that regulation and oversight was often, for all intents and purposes, absent in many cases.Snead’s book is a clarion call for what he calls “remembering the body.” This is an important book for anyone who may at some point become ill or disabled or who will end up caring for someone who is. That is, it is a book for everyone. It is by a leading scholar, but its readership is anyone with a body and who loves other people—or at least has some control over them.Give a listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The world of theater performances is often thought of as being composed of wealthy persons who received elite educations at art institutions all so they could be observed by a small, wealthy elite at exclusive and expensive gatherings. Theater is seen as an insular, elitist practice, for and by a select few. However, this image of theater is deeply misleading, especially as more performances are available for download, and many smaller more open institutions invest more in theater productions. One place that might surprise a lot of people is the popularity of performances staged by incarcerated persons, and presented in behind the walls of prisons. Theater is a social, communal practice, so making it happen within an institution that is not only isolated from the outside world, but is designed to isolate those within, will naturally come with various challenges, and also raises various questions on the nature of both theater and the carceral system. These are the questions Ashley Lucas addresses in her recent book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Bloomsbury, 2020). Featuring a combination of her own firsthand experience as a director of prison theater, interviews with those involved in the world prison theater and scholarly research, the book is a unique combination of genres that occupies some very interesting intersections, and is able to explore some very difficult topics, from questions of artistic expression, the nature of community and what hope in a hopeless situation looks like.Ashley Lucas is an associate professor of Theatre and Drama and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and is also the former director of the Prison Creative Arts Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Throughout American history, views on the proper relationship between the state and religion have been deeply divided. And, with recent changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, First Amendment law concerning religion is likely to change dramatically in the years ahead.In The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State (Oxford University Press, 2020), Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, two of America's leading constitutional scholars, begin by explaining how freedom of religion is enshrined in the First Amendment through two provisions. They defend a robust view of both clauses and work from the premise that that the establishment clause is best understood, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, as creating a wall separating church and state. After examining all the major approaches to the meaning of the Constitution's religion clauses, they contend that the best approaches are for the government to be strictly secular and for there to be no special exemptions for religious people from neutral and general laws that others must obey. In an America that is only becoming more diverse with respect to religion, this is not only the fairest approach, but the one most in tune with what the First Amendment actually prescribes.Both a pithy primer on the meaning of the religion clauses and a broad-ranging indictment of the Court's misinterpretation of them in recent years, The Religion Clauses shows how a separationist approach is most consistent with the concerns of the founders who drafted the Constitution and with the needs of a religiously pluralistic society in the 21st century.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law