New Books in Law

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status. This allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, in the more individualistic early modern England (1500-1700) landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority. This essentially excluded low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before. What effect do these phenomena have on one of the most significant social units: the family? In her new book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Daphna Hacker argues that the family is entering an important period of transition and instability in our bordered, global society. Families have been a legalized social category, but now competing legal doctrines and interpretations complicate the existence of this social category given the movement of people in a globalized society. How does secular law and family law impact families in multicultural countries with inhabitants from around the globe? Are pre-nups a good idea or a bad one? How does globalization influence reproduction in the family unit? How are current immigration debates intersecting with these changes to the family? Anyone interested in the law, gender, and globalization will find this book a great read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact, especially within polarized political periods. Reflecting the way this book examines both of these branches of government and the exercise of their respective powers, Investigating the President garnered two impressive book awards, from the Presidents and Executive Politics Section (Richard E. Neustadt Book Award) and from the Legislative Studies Section (Richard F. Fenno Book Award) of the American Political Science Association. Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler explore the precedent for congressional investigations into the conduct of and within the Executive branch, while they also amassed over 100 years of data surrounding congressional investigations to discern the impact of these kinds of investigations, even when they do not result, necessarily, in articles of impeachment or indictments of presidential appointees. Investigating the President notes the patterns of impact, from curbing presidential military engagement abroad to shifting the media focus and grabbing the narrative away from the president. The fascinating conclusion points to this under-researched area of congressional power and oversight that may have a more significant impact on presidential conduct and power than has generally been anticipated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (Yale University Press, 2016), Katrina Jagodinsky recovers the stories too often presumed lost in the silences of colonial archives: those of Indigenous women operating within systems of American law. In doing so, she argues that Indigenous women in the American southwest and Pacific northwest used Indigenous epistemologies, legal codes, and community connections, to navigate American settler colonial legal regimes and in some cases emerging victorious. Jagodinsky, an Associate Professor in the history department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, uses unique methodologies combining traditional legal history, poetry, and non-written knowledge networks to recount the histories of six women from the border regions of what is today Arizona/Sonora and Washington/British Columbia. Legal Codes and Talking Trees shows how even under ardently white supremacist power structures and within settler colonial societies designed to dispossess Indigenous communities, people not only straddled racial lines individually, but also made families that run counter to easy narratives. Jagodinsky’s book is a call to arms for historians and archivists not to take their academic privilege for granted, and to use innovative research methods to locate and retell difficult to find stories, even when the archives may seem as incomprehensible as the language of the trees. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Richard D. Brown’s new book Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017) offers a deft examination of the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal” and how it worked out practically in the young republic based on a vision of a new democratic order in which superior merit would mark the difference among citizens. From the beginning the nation struggled with the ideal and the reality of social inequality based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, age and social class. Americans debated the vision of equality as reserved before God alone, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Brown demonstrates how these debates played out in criminal trials and punishment, divorce cases, and among immigrants and African Americans. Seeking to distinguish themselves from the inherited class structure of England, Americans retained a feature that would make equality difficult to realize, namely inherited private property and patriarchal coverture. Brown gives us a thorough understanding of the myth of a classless society that has held sway since the founding of the nation. Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Leon Wiener Dow’s most recent work The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers readers intimate, informative, and at times provocative reflections on halakha, or Jewish law. The author makes nuanced philosophical and theological observations on the ideas and actions that define a halakhic life, and grounds his ideas with rich personal anecdotes that are woven throughout. Wiener Dow’s lively, captivating style of writing draws the reader into his powerful discussion of the roles that community, language, tradition, and evolution play in the halakhic journey. Leon Wiener Dow received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University and rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Professor David Hartman. He is currently a research fellow and faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, Israel. Robin Buller is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Typically the Jim Crow Era of segregation is understood as beginning directly after Reconstruction and going into the mid-twentieth century with the dual climaxes of the Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Movement in Montgomery, Alabama. What this narrative suggests is that Jim Crow was a southern phenomenon. Such a view is unfortunately ill conceived. Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), written by Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Associate Professor of History at Smith College, reshapes contemporary memory of when and why Jim Crow laws were enacted. In Colored Travelers, Dr. Pryor details how while antebellum-era Northern black abolitionists simultaneously fought to abolish slavery, they also pushed the limits of what citizenship meant by attempting to freely travel within it. They did this by challenging Northern Jim Crow laws set to undermine the mobility of black people in general, but this oppression hit black abolitionists most because of the mobility needed to reach their events. By using travel narratives, newspaper articles, and various primary sources of domestic and international black travel, Dr. Pryor explains why the pre-Civil War period was an essential training ground for the laws that would nationally become entrenched in the post-emancipation United States of America. Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A in History student at Simmons College in Boston, MA. He graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Fall 2015 with B.S. in History. Adam can be reached at @CulturedModesty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

John Corvino is Professor of Philosophy at the Wayne State University in Detroit. His academic work focuses on topics in moral, social, and legal philosophy surrounding sexuality, gender, marriage, religious conviction, and discrimination. But John is also an active public philosopher who frequently participates in public debates over these topics. He produces and appears in a popular YouTube series of short videos devoted to the philosophical discussion of controversial topics. He is the author of What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, co-author (with Maggie Ghallagher) of Debating Same Sex Marriage, and.co-author (with Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis) of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, all published with Oxford University Press.The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of riots across Taiwan that became an international crisis for the Eisenhower administration and raised serious questions about the legal status of US military forces positioned around the world. In American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy (Kentucky University Press, 2017), Stephen G. Craft provides a multi-archival study of the causes and consequences of the Reynolds trial and the ensuing protests. After more than a century of what they perceived as unfair treaties imposed by Western nations, the Taiwanese regarded the special legal status of resident American personnel with extreme distrust. While Eisenhower and his advisers considered Taiwan to be a vital ally against Chinese communism, the US believed that the Taiwanese government had instigated the unrest in order to protest the verdict and demand legal jurisdiction over GIs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Jon Olafsson is Professor in the n the department of Comparative and Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland. His research is focused on democracy, political participation, dissent, reconciliation, and social criticism. Jon has written extensively about the efforts in Iceland – from roughly 2010 to 2013 - to revise the nation’s constitution.The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law