New Books in Law

The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (Encounter Books, 2017), written by legal scholar Stephen F. Williams, uses a biographic account of the life and career of Vasily Maklakov to explore issues of legality and rule of law in Tsarist Russia from 1905, following the promulgation of the October Manifesto, which established a legislative body for the first time since the 1600s, till the Bolshevik Revolution. Maklakov, a moderate Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) reformer and practicing defense attorney (most famous for his defense of the Jewish Menahem Beilis, sometimes considered the Russian Dreyfus), was a delegate to the Second, Third and Fourth Dumas who advocated for political compromise, the establishment of rule of law and gradual constitutional reform. He advocated for a wide range of amendments to the Tsarist legal code, especially in the realms of religious freedom, national minorities, judicial independence, citizens judicial remedies, and peasant rights. As such Maklakov’s policies presented vivid contrast to the political tactics of the better-known Russian Left (the Narodniks, SRs, and Social Democrats) who refused to work with the autocracy and actively engaged in terrorism, at one point killing over 300 government employees a month in 1906, and advocating for the over through of the Tsarist regime. While Maklakov and other liberal reformist Russians ultimately failed in staving off revolution, in part due to the unwillingness of their own party to compromise with the Tsarist regime and accept anything other than a fully constitutional monarchy, Maklakov’s story serves as an example for movements seeking to liberalize authoritarian countries today—both as a warning and a guide. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book,Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his new book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College examines the trial of John Demjanjuk. The Right Wrong Man examines Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey that began in 1975. Over the course of the next several decades Demjanjuk was tried twice, first in Israel where he was thought to be “Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka” only to be exonerated, owing to a case of mistaken identity. He was then tried in Munich for his actual crimes as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. The Right Wrong Man is a fascinating look at the law’s effort to bring closure to the horrific events of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how African Americans utilized courts for disputes over property, personal injury, and workplace compensation, among other fields. She argues for a reexamination of African American agency through the use of the courts. In a fascinating juxtaposition, Milewski‘s work also addresses the white lawyers, juries, judges and, of course, often plaintiffs or defendants within these cases, some of whom operated out of concern, some through paternalism, and some, either overtly or not, in order to maintain white supremacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Claiming Turtle Mountain’s Constitution: The History, Legacy, and Future of a Tribal Nation’s Founding Documents (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Turtle Mountain Tribal Court Associate Justice and UNC-Chapel Hill American Studies Assistant ProfessorKeith Richotte, Jr., offers a critical examination of one tribal nation’s decision to adopt a constitution. In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce’s choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In her recent book, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Stephanie Hinnershitz (Cleveland State University) examines the important but overlooked contributions of Asian Americans to civil rights activism in the U.S. South. Hinnershitz takes a thematic focus across the long 20th century to show how Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and South Asians contested discrimination in land ownership, education, sexual relations and marriage, and business entrepreneurship. From “self-Orientalizing” as non-colored people to invoking their privileges as foreign nationals or refugees, the strategies and arguments that Asian Americans employed in the long and uneven struggle for equality were as varied as they were creative. Hinnershitz uses a wide-ranging source base including legal opinions, newspapers, and oral histories to narrate heartbreaking losses as well as surprising victories, such as the injunction against Klan violence that Vietnamese fishermen won in Texas in 1981. A Different Shade of Justice will interest readers of 20th-century US history, legal history, southern history, and Asian American history. Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied roles of women in relief efforts during the war, and “Army at Home”: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), which concerns the experiences of working class women in the north. She is also the principal editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia (2014). Her latest book, and the subject of our discussion, is Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of an American Morality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality. We discuss how crucial, and yet understudied, questions of sex and desire are to the Civil War era and how silence around them has affected the ways we talk about and regulate social relations today. Much of our conversation focuses on how a small group of men created new regulations around pornography, the constitution of which was always up for debate, to hold onto the political and social power that they felt to be threatened by men of a lower class or of a different race. Prominent among this group of regulators, and a leading face of the postwar anti-vice campaigns, was Anthony Comstock. After serving in a largely inactive regiment during the war, and feeling left out of the camaraderie generated by the sharing of pornography among his fellow soldiers, Comstock fashioned for himself a largely illusory legal fraternity of moral crusaders. For pornography was hardly the main issue for those who associated themselves with his cause. Geisberg writes and talks about how other men in power negotiated the place of newly freed slaves by tightening the regulatory role that marriage played in their “free” lives. Doctors jumped at the opportunity to regulate abortion and contraception as a way to further professionalize themselves after postwar advances in medicine. Both of these groups became part of an omnibus of social reform that affects the country to this day. As you will hear over the course of our conversation, the importance of Giesberg’s account is in showing the connections between these issues and how they come together in the Civil War. Sexual abuse was at the center of social systems, including slavery. But the legal articulations of sexual crimes after the war created more easily regulated vices that distracted attention aw... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The recent spate of revelations about high-profile sexual predators who have been harassing and assaulting women, sometimes for decades, along with the #MeToo campaign, have drawn renewed attention to the pernicious problem of discrimination in the workplace. We speak about these issues with Suja Thomas, whose new book, with co-author Sandra Sperino, shows us how (male) judges have invented an entire body of jurisprudence to justify dismissing sexual harassment cases before they can even get to juries. Join us for this timely and provocative discussion about Unequal: How American Courts Undermine Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press, 2017). 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 University Press, 2017).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In her new book, Asylum by Boat: Origins of Australia’s Refugee Policy (New South Press, 2017), Claire Higgins, a Senior Research Associate at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales Law School, explores the origins of Australia’s refugee policy. She investigates the Australian government’s response to the arrival by boat, in the late 1970s, of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. Unlike today, however, while boat turn-backs and detention were considered, these policies were rejected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Seana Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA. She defends the “thinker theory” of freedom of speech, which holds that a central reason for upholding a moral and legal system of free speech is that such a system is necessary for free thought and reflective action. This view is articulated in her book, Speech Matters:On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton 2014).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

In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass incarceration and the carceral state are hot topics in law and criminology, as the American criminal justice system faces mounting criticism for imprisoning disproportionate numbers of minorities, especially blacks. But as James Forman Jr. lays out in this book, the war on crime that saw its origins in the 1970s found a great deal of support among African American citizens, community leaders, and politicians across America’s urban landscape. Locking Up Our Own tries to understand this phenomenon. James Forman Jr. is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions race and class dimensions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law