New Books in Law

Campaigns against prostitution of young people in the United States have surged and ebbed multiple times over the last fifty years. Carrie Baker's Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade: Gender, Race, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines how politically and ideologically diverse activists joined together to change perceptions and public policies on youth involvement in the sex trade over time, reframing 'juvenile prostitution' of the 1970s as 'commercial sexual exploitation of children' in the 1990s, and then as 'domestic minor sex trafficking' in the 2000s. Based on organizational archives and interviews with activists, Baker shows that these campaigns were fundamentally shaped by the politics of gender, race and class, and global anti-trafficking campaigns. The author argues that the very frames that have made these movements so successful in achieving new laws and programs for youth have limited their ability to achieve systematic reforms that could decrease youth vulnerability to involvement in the sex trade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this New Books Network/Gotham Center for NYC History podcast, guest host Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM, interviews Jeanne Theoharis, distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Their topic is a new book just out from NYU Press, co-edited by Theoharis, called The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019).The book looks at the history of institutionalized racism around the U.S., showing that laws, policies, and entitlements in every region of the country not only created segregated communities, but also promoted affluence and opportunities for white Americans while keeping African Americans out of the middle class.“There did not need to be a ‘no coloreds’ sign for hotels, restaurants, pools, parks, housing complexes, schools, and jobs to be segregated across the North as well,” wrote Theoharis and her co-editor Professor Brian Purnell of Bowdoin College.In the podcast, Theoharis shows how African-Americans have faced discrimination in everything from pre-Civil War legal codes in New York, to 20th-century government programs like Social Security and the G.I. bill. She and Harpaz also discuss the ways in which the legacy of these racist policies persist today in public education, the criminal justice system, and other aspects of American society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

It is an article of faith in many circles that the most effective and efficient way to solve a broad range of local and national problems is through public-private partnerships. What’s not to like? Especially in a climate in which people think resources are scarce, seeking out help from corporate actors seems an obvious win-win. But it’s not. Listen to Jonathan H. Marks discuss The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the public harm and private profiteering that are too often the result of these relationships.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Moral and political theorists have paid a healthy amount of attention to states’ rights to determine who may reside within their territory.  Accordingly, there’s a large literature on immigration, borders, asylum, and refugees.  However, relatively little work has been done on questions concerning how refugees are treated once they have gained access to a new country; and from these questions emerge additional issues concerning the repatriation of refugees.  As it turns out, there are several global organizations involved in efforts to make repatriation accessible to refugees.  However, it is frequently the case that repatriation is dangerous and risky; and often the refugees’ desire to repatriate is arguably non-voluntary.  Distinctive moral concerns quickly into view.In The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation (University of Edinburgh Press, 2018), Mollie Gerver systematically addresses these distinctive moral questions.  Combining philosophical analysis with testimonial data from extensive field work with refugees, she makes concrete policy recommendations for navigating this fraught moral landscape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2018), Abraham Singer essentially marries together two disciplinary schools of thought and approaches to understand and consider the corporate firm. In his work, Singer takes seriously the idea, structure, function, and position of the firm, as distinct from markets, within modern societies. Singer notes that the thrust of the book is “to articulate a normative theory of the corporation that synthesizes economic and political insights” and positions these understandings within the political and economic realities of contemporary capitalism and liberalism. Singer analyzes and explores the historical and theoretical development of firms and corporations, integrating economic and political theory as the dual lenses through which to consider not only the firms themselves but also their position and function within political societies, since “corporations serve economic ends, but through political means.” The Form of the Firm considers how and in what ways firms can and should contribute to and sustain the values, particularly the political values, that define and inform the world in which they exist. This analysis has broad and interdisciplinary appeal, especially for political theorists, economists, political scientists, managerialists, legal and regulatory experts, ethicists, and those in corporate governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. Winner of the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers Colwell's personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (Columbia University Press 2015, paperback 2018), Jill Stauffer argues that survivors of unjust treatment and dehumanization can experience further harm when individuals and institutions will not or cannot hear the survivors’ claims about what they suffered and what they are owed for having suffered. She calls this further harm “ethical loneliness.” With Stauffer’s analysis, the harm of ethical loneliness can lead us to rethink how we understand responsibility for harm, the work of repair, the role of retribution in repair, and how we are constituted as subjects such that we are capable of striving to undo unjust deeds, even mass atrocities. Focused on hearing and what practices of hearing justice demands, Stauffer looks to survivors’ stories to analyze how the harm of ethical loneliness can be inflicted, even by people with intentions to help and survivors. She then shows how revisionary and reparative work can be done to hear those stories with an ear to how the world may need to change in light of survivors’ claims. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student of the longer historical relationship between law enforcement and people of color will know, this relationship has been the subject of tension and scrutiny at many moments in the past as well. In his new book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Max Felker-Kantor examines this multi-racial relationship in the key city of Los Angeles. The book begins with the uprising of the Watts neighborhood in August 1965, where decades of frustration with urban poverty and racial discrimination along with anger at racist police practices exploded in violence. The book then traces the subsequent decades of policing and anti-police abuse activism. During this time, reforms were common, yet real change was often difficult to achieve as symbolized by the 1992 rebellion, sparked by some of the same issues that caused the previous Watts uprising.In this episode of the podcast, Felker-Kantor discusses this history of policing and importantly, the way LA communities of color mobilized to reshape law enforcement in the city. He highlights both the achievements and limitations of their reform. He also discusses both the possibilities and limits of urban political reformers working within city government and the ways in which the police themselves became a political force. Finally, Felker-Kantor discusses some of the little-used archival sources he examined for this project in light of the notorious difficulty historians have faced obtaining access to law enforcement records for histories of policing.Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Hard won transgender rights have been under attack by the Trump administration. Officials across government have sought to overturn decisions made by the Obama administration to expand rights to transgender people. Who fought those battles and continues to lobby to defend the transgender community is the topic of Anthony Nownes' new book Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement (SUNY Press, 2019). Nownes is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.In the book, Nownes uncovers the rise of transgender rights interest groups in the United States. Based on extensive interviews with the founders and leaders of many of these groups. Organizing for Transgender Rights not only shows how these groups formed but also how they mobilized and survived. The book contributes to better understanding this social movement and also the ways that interest groups develop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral contagion' of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement. The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment. They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts. By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion of national citizenship - one that guaranteed a number of rights against state regulation - they exposed the ambiguity and potential power of national citizenship as a legal category. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the robust understanding of citizenship championed by Antebellum free people of color, by people afflicted with 'moral contagion’. In his new book Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America(Cambridge University Press, 2019), Michael A. Schoeppner tells their story. Listen in.Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law