New Books in Law

In this episode, we interview Prof. Bernard Freamon on his new book Possessed by the Right Hand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flung corners of these war-torn countries were subjected to background checks and instructed about international law and human rights, and their funding was cut when they crossed red lines. To what extent have such mechanisms curbed the dangers of proxy warfare, and what unforeseen consequences has this approach unleashed?Drawing on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders, in Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Erica L. Gaston unpacks the dilemmas of attempting to control proxy forces. She demonstrates that, although the tools U.S. policy makers used to constrain partners’ behavior increased in number and sophistication, they never fully addressed the range of political, security, and legal concerns surrounding these forces. Moreover, by shifting policy makers’ calculations, the use of proxy forces introduced additional moral hazards and may have enabled riskier decision making. Featuring substantial empirical detail and close analysis of key internal debates, Illusions of Control offers new perspectives on some of the most significant and controversial elements of recent U.S. security policy. In addition to nuanced insights about proxy relationships, this book provides a novel analytical toolkit for exploring transnational bargaining and foreign policy deliberations in hybrid political environments.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

Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections shielding them from political interventions. Those assumptions might always have been more hopeful than sound. A battle over the control of the university classroom is now brewing, and the courts will be called upon to establish clearer guidelines as to what – if any – limits legislatures might have in dictating what is taught in public universities. In You Can't Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms (Polity Press, 2024), Keith Whittington argues that the First Amendment imposes meaningful limits on how government officials can restrict the ideas discussed on university campuses. In clear and accessible prose, he illuminates the legal status of academic freedom in the United States and shows how existing constitutional doctrine can be deployed to protect unbridled free inquiry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In this episode, we talk to Professor Jonathan Brown about his book, Slavery and Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Dr. Paul DeHart, professor of Political Science at Texas State University and author of The Social Contract in the Ruins:  Natural Law and Government by Consent (University of Missouri Press, 2024). In this illuminating discussion, Dr. DeHart challenges the prevailing belief that social contract theory and classical natural law are fundamentally incompatible. His book offers a bold argument: political authority and obligation cannot be grounded solely in human agreement but must rest on a deeper, antecedent moral foundation—one that is uncreated and independent of human or divine will. Without this objective moral good, even the widely accepted principle of government by consent loses its coherence.Throughout the episode, Dr. DeHart explores key philosophical questions surrounding political legitimacy and the moral underpinnings of authority. We dive into why modern approaches to grounding political authority through consent alone are self-defeating and how classical natural law is essential to upholding the principles that guide just governance.Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the intersection between political theory, philosophy, and morality, as well as the relevance of these ideas in today's political landscape. Whether you're a scholar of political philosophy or simply curious about the foundations of political authority, this episode is packed with rich insights and thoughtful discussion.Dr. Dehart’s other works:Uncovering the Constitution's Moral DesignReason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of FaithMadison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (UNC Press, 2024) recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870.Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did not. At the same time, it follows the thousands of people that exercised emigration right citizenship by leaving the United States for settlements elsewhere in North America. Ultimately, Schlereth shows that national allegiance was often no more powerful than the freedom to cast it aside. The advent of emigrant rights had lasting implications, for it suggested that people are free to move throughout the world and to decide for themselves the nation they belong to. This claim remains urgent in the twenty-first century as limitations on personal mobility persist inside the United States and at its borders.This interview was conducted by Hannah Nolan, a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses upon the intersection of memory, partisanship, and ethnic identity during the early republic to explore the construction of Irish and American identities in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for women who face immense barriers to access abortion, or to parent their children safely.With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, adoption increasingly functions as an institution that perpetuates reproductive injustice by separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family building for middle-upper-class white people. Based on hundreds of in-depth interviews, Relinquished centers and amplifies the voices of relinquishing mothers, and fills an important gap in the national conversation about reproductive politics and justice. Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, and Affiliate Faculty of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the co-author of Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What is it like to be a human rights lawyer in Thailand? How does the new generation of 2020s political activists differ from those of previous eras? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, we talk to Kunthika Nutcharut about her work with Thai Lawyers for Human Rights.Kunthika comes from a political family – her lawyer father Krisadang Nutcharut was a student activisit in the 1970s – and she studied and worked in Germany before deciding to return to Thailand to taken on the challenging work of defending outspoken figures in the post-2020 student-led protest movement.Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.Chayata Sripanich is a research associate with the Generation Thailand project.Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant is Li Xinruo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Dr. Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics (NYU Press, 2023) is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation.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

What threatens American democracy and the rule of law? In her new book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians (NYU Press, 2024),legal scholar and campaign spending expert Ciara Torres-Spelliscy argues that the USA’s privately-funded campaign finance system – combined with corporate greed and antidemocratic strains in the modern Republican Party – endangers American democracy. As she sees it, unseen political actors and untraceable dark money influence our elections, while anti-democratic rhetoric threatens a tilt towards authoritarianism.Drawing on key Supreme Court cases such as Citizens United, Professor Torres-Spelliscy explores how corporations have undermined democratic norms, practices, and laws. From bankrolling regressive politicians to funding ghost candidates with dark money, the book exposes how corporations subvert the will of the American people – yet courts struggle to hold corporate interests and corrupt politicians accountable. If American democracy is going to survive in the long term, then the deep pockets of the largest corporations cannot be allowed to join focus with the anti-democratic fringe. Professor Torres-Spelliscy fears a repeat of the January 6th insurrection – but with expansive corporate sponsorship.Professor Torres Spelliscy outlines the ways in which Corporate forces might be held accountable by the courts, their shareholders, and citizens themselves. Along with other reforms, she proposes a democracy litmus test that requires loyalty to democracy in politics and the economy.The end of the podcast features her insights on how oil interests crypto “techno bros” have invested in the outcome of the November 2024 election.Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a Professor of Law at Stetson Law. She is also a Brennan Center Fellow at NYU Law School who has testified before Congress as an expert on campaign finance and has helped draft Supreme Court briefs. Previously, she authored Corporate Citizen (Carolina 2016) and Political Brands (Elgar 2019). She has recently written about public financing and the Eric Adams indictments and crypto spending in the 2024 election.Mentioned in the podcast: Judd Legum's work on corporate PACs in his Substack, Popular Information Photo with Barack Obama for which Jho Low paid $20 million can be seen here Example of 2022 media attempts to identify “sedition caucus” and election deniers for voters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law