New Books in Law

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment. In her riveting new book Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017), Sarah Eltantawi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion at Evergreen State College, offers a dazzlingly nuanced and lucid account of the past and present of the stoning punishment in Northern Nigeria. Effortlessly moving between pre-modern and contemporary archives and contexts, Eltantawi traces the shifting meanings and political projects that have been invested into the stoning punishment over time. Historically grounded, theoretically exciting, and lucidly composed, this book is sure to spark important conversations and debates in multiple fields. It will also make a wonderful text for undergraduate and graduate seminars for courses on Islam, Islamic Law, Gender and Sexuality, and on Islam in Africa. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

William Davenport Mercer‘s Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) argues that if we want to understand how Americans in the early Republic viewed the sources of their rights, we need look no further than the mud at the bottom of Baltimore harbor. In the early nineteenth century, two men, John Barron, Jr. and John Craig, decided to buy a Baltimore wharf on credit. They were hoping to capitalize on rapidly-expanding commercial growth in city in the wake of the War of 1812. Instead, the city diverted water into the harbor, leaving Barron and Craig’s wharf silted up and the pair with a pile of debt. The men sued, and eventually their case was argued before the Supreme Court. The decision in Barron v. Baltimore, as William Davenport Mercer shows, marked a key development in the history of American constitutionalism. In arguing that the Bill of Rights (and thus, the Fifth Amendment) applied only at the Federal level, the court rejected a multi-sourced view of liberties. The contentious politics of the era, Dr. Mercer argues, precipitated our modern turn toward locating the sources of rights exclusively in documents. Dr. Mercer teaches history and law at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

This week on the podcast we have a true political science legend. David R. Mayhew is the author of such political science greats as Congress: The Electoral Connection, Divided We Govern, and Partisan Balance. He is the Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale University. In his recent book, Mayhew examines the job America’s most routinely disparaged branch of government has actually done? The Imprint of Congress (Yale University Press, 2017) gives a deep historical analysis of the U.S. Congress’s performance since the late eighteenth century. He tracks major policy challenges addressed by Congress. In the end, Mayhew argues that Congress has actually accomplished a lot and, in doing so, balanced the presidency in a surprising variety of ways. In the podcast, Mayhew also discusses our current debate on polarization and the early Trump administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that, moralizing and paternalistic projects for trafficking’s elimination, as well as indicator projects for its enumeration, might be set to one side, and replaced with other ways of knowing and dealing with the phenomenon that might be rather more sensible, if less aspirational. Sverre Molland joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the many layers of deception and consent in sex work, bad faith among traffickers and anti-traffickers, the misguidance of the market metaphor, teens trading teens, agency, structural violence, and the trend towards privately funded anti-trafficking and anti-slavery projects in Southeast Asia. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Holly High, Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Josh Chafetz‘s new book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers (Yale University Press, 2017), examines Congress as a branch and the powers of the legislature within the constitutional system. This book approaches the Legislative branch historically, constitutionally, politically, and structurally through the separation of powers. Chafetz situates Congress as one of three political branches of government, each deriving power from the public, the constitution, formal responsibilities (like the Senate’s role in confirmation, or Congress’s power of the purse), and also informal capacities. In analyzing Congress, Chafetz makes use of the schematic framework of hard and soft power, often used by scholars to analyze international relations, contextualizing the kinds of powers that Congress has and how those powers have been used over the history of the branch and continue to be used. Chafetz explains his thesis in regard to the separation of powers theories as a “multiplicity based” understanding of the claims made to authority not only by Congress, but also by the Executive and Judicial branches, noting that there are multiple and overlapping claims to authority. The book will be of interest to a range of scholars and readers, since Chafetz integrates American political development, constitutional history, contemporary American politics, and the complexity of the development of British legislative authority that preceded and contributed to the American constitutional system. This is an accessible, complex, and fascinating book about American politics, the constitutional system, and, especially legislative authority within the system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the history of the state’s constitutions since it was first incorporated into the United States in the 1840s. Yet, she concentrates on the reform efforts begun during World War II and culminating in a new constitution in 1968. Adkins reviews the political interests that pushed for a new constitution, from the League of Women Voters to the new residents in the emergent southern coasts of Florida in the 1960s. Adkins reviews the process of reforming a constitution that was rooted in the traditional rotten borough politics of 19th-century Florida. She analyzes the impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s that forced states to reapportion their legislatures, contending that Florida’s districts were so malapportioned that without the Court’s decisions there might not have been any constitutional revision. Adkins also discusses today’s constitutional revision process, which is ongoing every 20 years and is occurring in 2017. Florida’s political context has always been an amalgam of traditional Southern politics and the emergent commercial and tourism-based economy of a coastal state. Adkin’s book illuminates how these conditions produced political conflict and constitutional change. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Ryan Alford is a law professor at Lakehead University and a specialist in constitutional law. His book Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of Rule of Law (McGill Queens University Press, 2017), offers a fresh perspective on debates about the expansion of executive authority in the US in the post-9/11 period and has become even more topical in light of President Trump and the power he seeks to exercise. Drawing on a broader canvas of legal history and comparative law than is common in the field, Alford sketches a global standard of what constitutes a “rule of law state,” and applies this to make clear the extent to which Presidential power has departed from historical norms, amounting in essence to an “elective dictatorship.” Among the many novel facets of Alford’s study are the lines it traces between strategies of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations and those attempted by Nixon. Offering a powerful argument for why recent presidents have been more successful than Nixon in assertions of greater power, Alford points to important differences in context, including the lack of support for the war in Vietnam in contrast to the war on terror, the process surrounding judicial appointments, and campaign financing. The interview below aims to give a sense of the book’s wide ranging examination of factors that make reform of the dictatorial presidency unlikely in the short term and questionable in the long term. Robert Diab is a law professor at Thompson Rivers University and the author of The Harbinger Theory: How the Post-911 Emergency Became Permanent and the Case for Reform (Oxford 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The U.S. population is aging and we often rely on our family to care for us during our twilight years. But, families today can be quite complex, with divorce, step-families, and cohabitation changing the roles that family members are used to playing. In their new book, Homeward Bound: Modern Families, Elder Care, and Loss (Oxford University Press, 2017), Amy Ziettlow and Naomi Cahn interview families caring for a parent at the end of life and write about how these new norms and obligations are navigated in modern families. The book addresses many issues that become apparent at the end of life: family roles, financial as well as time costs, in addition to the planning (or lack thereof) for decisions that need to be made at the end of life for the parent. After the parent passes away, roles, once again, must be negotiated in families in addition to negotiations around wealth transfers and mourning. This book would be a good addition to an upper level Sociology course on families or death and dying as the stories help illustrate some basic concepts and ideas. This book has a wide audience and would be of interest to sociologists, gerontologists, lawyers, as well as clergy or other religious leaders who help with end of life care. Ziettlow and Cahn not only provide interesting stories to illustrate what they find, they leave the reader with helpful tips and guides at the end of the book just in case the person reading it is also going through this life transition with a family member. Sarah E. Patterson is a Family Demographer and is ABD at Penn State. Follow and tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial societies? Join us as we speak with David Garland, author of The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016) , a whirlwind tour of the welfare state, past and present. 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

Susanna L. Blumenthal is a professor of law and associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) won the 2017 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Blumenthal offers a historical examination of the jurisprudence of insanity, legal capacity, and accountability from post-revolutionary America through the nineteenth century. Americans struggling to set the boundaries of ordered liberty turned to Common Sense philosophy that held to divinely given rational faculties of intellect, volition, and moral sense. Republican citizenship assumed that a reasonable man, as a legal person, would act accordingly. The market economy of self-made men, the new field of medical psychology, will and contract challenges over wealth and property, tort law and increased liability claims exposed the inadequacy of social and political norms in defining human fallibility, and the limits of responsibility. Litigants, lawyers, judges, and medical experts struggled to find a reliable way to settle issues of mental competency and define the bounds of freedom. The incapacity of married women, children, and slaves provided a means of comparison for the male citizen involving metaphysical, political, social, and economic ideas wrapped up in the concept of self-government. Blumenthal has produced a remarkable piece of intellectual and legal history situated in the rapidly changing market environment of a young republic. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming 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