New Books in Law

This conversation includes James Boyle, Duke University; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, UPR-M; Héctor José Huyke, UPR-M, and Natalia Bustos, UPR-M.This is the first of two episodes about The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Encuentros descoloniales focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how decolonial approaches ​​can provide nuance in scientific knowledge.This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPRM have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. The conversation is part of the “STEM to STEAM” project of the “Cornerstone” initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which stresses the importance of integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood is available online for free through the MIT website per the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Today I’m speaking with Shimon Shetreet, Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University and a former politician. We are discussing his recently published work, co-edited with Hiram Chodosh, titled Judicial Independence: Cornerstone of Democracy. Democracies around the world, from Israel and Mexico to Poland and Hungary, are grappling with challenges to judicial independence. Attacks on judicial independence often masquerade as attempts to strengthen democracy, despite the necessity of judicial independence to uphold constitutionality, hold no one above the law, and protect the most vulnerable people. This volume offers a truly comprehensive view of the global challenges facing judicial independence.Shimon Shetreet is an Israeli former politician who held several ministerial portfolios between 1992 and 1996. He is currently the Greenblatt Chair of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

International Development Law: Rule of Law, Human Rights & Global Finance (Springer, 2020) describes how international development works, its shortcomings, its theoretical and practical foundations, along with prescriptions for the future. It provides the reader with new perspectives on the origins of global poverty, identifies legal impediments to sustainable economic growth, and provides a better understanding of the challenges faced by the international community in resolving global poverty issues. The text is structured into two basic parts: the first part deals with the theoretical and philosophic foundations of the subject, and the second part sets forth issues relating to the international financial architecture, namely, international borrowing practices, privatization, and emerging economies. In particular, the book provides new, innovative analysis on corruption as an impediment to sustainable development. The three interlocking facets of corruption are examined: transnational organized crime, Islamic-based international terrorism, and corruption within emerging economies and the international banking system. Thus fresh new analysis adds depth and clarity to a field that heretofore has been scattered and superficial. Finally, the “right to development” within the international human rights discourse is critically reviewed, particularly in light of new jurisprudence emerging from the African context.This book offers a fresh, new and balanced legal perspective on the development process. The text has been rigorously researched and has many practical facets based on the author’s professional experience within the international development field. It is an invaluable research and teaching tool since it takes a multidisciplinary approach to putting complex issues, legal trends and political questions into a clear, new perspective that is highly analytical as well as accessible to the reader. The author's elegant legal prose is both powerful and persuasive.Rumu Sarkar is Adjunct Law Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence.Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum (NYU Press, 2024) examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin describe the women's histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince Immigration Judges that rape and other forms of "private violence" should merit asylum - despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors.Private Violence provides much-needed recommendations for incorporating a gender-based lens in the asylum process. The authors demonstrate how policy changes across Presidential administrations have made it difficult for survivors of "private violence" to qualify for asylum. Private Violence paints a damning portrait of America's broken asylum system. This volume illustrates the difficulties experienced by Latin American women who rely on this broken system for protection in the United States. It also illuminates women's resilience and the determination of immigration attorneys to reshape asylum law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024), Chaya T. Halberstam challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual judge's personal relationships, reactive emotions, and impulse to care.Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in ancient Jewish writings alongside minor case stories in Josephus and rabbinic literature. She shows both the consistency of a counter-tradition that sees legal practice as contingent upon relationship and emotion, and the specific ways in which that perspective was manifest in changing times and contexts.Interviewee: Chaya T. Halberstam is Professor of Religious Studies at King's University College, University of Western Ontario.Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how their history can shed new light on contemporary global dilemmas.With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, and based on archival research carried out across seven countries, Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Edward Jones Corredera studies 400 years of history and unearths overlooked congressional debates and understudied thinkers. The book shows how discussions on the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America.This new history of the moral economy of the Hispanic World from the 1520s to the 1920s illuminates contemporary issues in international law and international relations. Latin American jurists developed a global critique of economics and international law that continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral global economy.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2019),Benjamin Meiches takes a novel approach to the study of genocide by analyzing the ways in which ideas, concepts, and understandings about what genocide is and how it is to be prevented have become entrenched politically and intellectually. At the center of this analysis is what Meiches refers to throughout his text as the hegemonic understanding of genocide. Using what Michel Foucault describes as genealogy, Meiches set out to evaluate the process by which the concept of genocide has become intelligible. In doing so, Meiches offers significant evidence in support of many of the emerging critiques of the field of genocide studies. Meiches also inspires reflective and introspective thinking regarding the ways in which genocide scholarship contributes to the maintenance of a hegemonic understanding of genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The Rhodes blood libel of 1840, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, was initiated by the island’s governor in collusion with Levantine merchants, who charged the local Jewish community with murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. An episode in the shared histories of Ottomans and Jews, it was forgotten by the former and, even if remembered, misunderstood by the latter. The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era (Berghahn Books, 2024) aims to restore the place of this event in Sephardi and Ottoman history.Based on newly discovered Ottoman and Jewish sources it argues that the acquittal of Rhodian Jews is adequately understood only in the context of the Tanzimat and the Sublime Porte’s foreign relations. Contrary to the common view that Ottoman Jews did not experience the impact of the Tanzimat reforms until the mid-1850s, this study shows that their effects were felt as early as 1840. Furthermore, this book offers a window onto life and intercommunal relations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test.Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (W. W. Norton, 2021), Benjamin T. Smith offers a history of the trade and its effects upon the people of Mexico. As he reveals, at the start of the 20th century drugs such as marijuana and opium were largely on the margins of Mexican society, used mainly by soldiers, prisoners, and immigrants. The association of marijuana with a bohemian subculture in the early 1920s prompted the first punitive laws against it, while the use of opium by Chinese immigrants led Mexican officials to target the drug as a means to arrest the country’s Chinese population.Yet the drug trade thrived thanks to the growing demand for marijuana and heroin in the United States. In response, American officials pressured their Mexican counterparts to end drug production and distribution in their country, even to the point of ending the effort to provide heroin in a regulated way for the country’s relatively small population of heroin addicts. Yet these efforts often foundered on the economic factors involved, with many government officials protecting the trade either for personal profit or for the financial benefits the trade provided to their states. This trade only grew in the postwar era, as the explosion of drug use in the 1960s and the crackdown on the European heroin trade made Mexico an increasingly important supplier of narcotics to the United States. The vast profits to be made from this changed the nature of the trade from small-scale family-managed operations to much more complex organizations that increasingly employed violence to ensure their share of it. As Smith details, the consequences of this have proven enormously detrimental both to the Mexican state and to the Mexican people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law