New Books in Law

Covert violence occurs in all social institutions—including families and close relationships, education, workplaces, politics, mass media, and healthcare—each with its own unique power dynamics that shape the incidence and patterns of these vicious acts. Covert Violence: The Secret Weapon of the Powerless (Bristol University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jack Levin and Dr. Julie B. Wiest focuses on the types of surreptitious murder and mayhem that perpetrators intend to go unnoticed by would-be victims—until it’s too late. When such attacks are carried out with efficiency and competence, they may be disguised in official records as the result of illness, accident, or intentional self-harm, only on occasion to be later reclassified as the brutal crimes they are.This compelling and much-needed book is for all those who seek to understand—and strive to prevent—violence in society.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Isabella Alexander's book Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the intertwined histories of mapmaking and copyright law in Britain from the early modern period up to World War 1, focusing chiefly on the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach and making extensive use of the archival record, this is the first detailed, historical account of the relationship between maps and copyright. As such, it examines how the emergence and development of copyright law affected mapmakers and the map trade and how the application of copyright law to the field of mapmaking affected the development of copyright doctrine. Its explorations cast new light on the circulation of geographical knowledge, different cultures of authorship and creativity, and connections between copyright law, print culture, technology, and society. The book will be of interest to legal historians, intellectual property scholars, and historians of the map and print culture, as well as those interested in the history of knowledge and how legal control over data has been exerted over time. It takes the reader back to the earliest attempts to establish who can own and control geographical information and its graphic representation in the form of a map. In so doing, it establishes a long history of tension between the interests of private enterprise, government, and the public. The book's investigations end in the first decades of the 20th century, but the tensions it identifies persist in the 21st century, although today paper maps have been largely replaced by web-based mapping platforms and digital geospatial data. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Australian Research Council. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working life, and a kind of moral complicity."– Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict.There are many more examples of professional solidarity, however fragmented and tentative, sharing the link of a common ethic that helps make systems, and the analysis of them, possible in the larger political economy. Writing from a law professor’s vantage point, Katharina Pistor, in her new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019) explains how even though law is a social good it has been harnessed as a private commodity over time that creates private wealth, and plays a significant role in the increasing disparity of financial outcomes.As she points out in this interview, and her chapter ‘Masters of the Code’, it is ‘critical to have lawyers in the room’, and they clearly have the lead role in her well-researched and nuanced thesis centered on the decentralized institution of private law. Professor Pistor builds on Rudden’s ‘feudal calculus’ providing the long view of legal systems in maintaining and creating wealth and draws on historical analogies including the enclosure movements as she interweaves her analysis of capital asset creation with a broader critique of professional and institutional agency. Polanyi and Piketty figure into Pistor’s analysis among many others, as does the help of the state’s coercive backing as she draws on the breadth of her own governance research and analysis of the collapsed socialist regimes in the 1990s, and a research pivot toward western market economies following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.Professor Pistor is a comparative scholar with a keen interdisciplinary eye for the relationship between law, values, and markets, dovetailing larger concepts with detailed descriptions of the coding of ‘stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations—assets that exist only in law.’ All of which informs her inquiry into why some legal systems have been more accommodating to capital’s coding cravings and others less so, as she describes the process by which capital is created. She moves beyond legal realism’s less granular critiques, and as reviewers such as Samuel Moyn have suggested – this book ‘deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy’.Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law, and the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School.Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law from its conception until the early years of the 1940s. The law, which began as a state effort to tamp down radicalism and “dangerous thought” (mostly Marxism) and preserve and protect imperial sovereignty, spawned a massive apparatus populated by both state and nonstate actors dedicated to ideologically converting and rehabilitating thought criminals. In addition to being a case study of the nature and ideology of punishment and repentance for thought crimes in late Imperial Japan—and the way in which the emperor functioned as a “ghost in the machine” animating the pursuit of political repression—Ward’s book also provides insight into the policing of ideological threats and its relationship to national identity politics. Thought Crime follows the evolution and transformation of the Peace Preservation Law and its attendant social and institutional structures from interwar attempts to repress dangerous thought to a system of mass ideological conversion, and finally to the consequences of its integration into practices of total mobilization during wartime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Authorship represents a new area of policy-related work within higher education research administration, funding agencies, and scholarly journal publishing. Developing Authorship and Copyright Ownership Policies: Best Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) by Allyson Mower offers the unique aspect of combining details on copyright ownership as well as authorship into a single volume on best practices for administrators, journal publishers, research managers, and policy drafters within and outside of higher education. Discover more about the definition of 'author'--from data gatherer to writer--to inform policy development while understanding the interconnected relationships between authorship, copyright ownership, and scholarly communication. This book will also demonstrate how to develop inclusive and equitable authorship policies that reflect the range of diversity within the research endeavor and scholarly publishing.Allyson Mower, MA, MLIS has served as the scholarly communication and copyright librarian at the University of Utah Marriott Library since 2008. Her expertise focuses on authorship—both current and historical trends—as well as the connections between information access, reading, and authoring. She developed the Utah Reading Census, an annual survey to determine Utahns’ attitudes towards reading and convened the France Davis Utah Black Archive in 2021. Allyson also serves as the policy liaison for the Academic Senate and runs a professional development book club.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.Recommended Books: Robert Caro, The Path to Power William Shawcross, Sideshow Dexter Filkins, The Forever War Adam Winkler, Gun Fight Tim Mak, Misfire Doug Stanton, Horse Solidiers Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Paris, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'? A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France (Oxford UP, 2024) is an original and wide-ranging account of the impact of the religious wars on daily life. Based on neglected archival sources and an exceptional criminal trial, it recovers the experiences of women, peasants, and foot soldiers, who are marginalized in most historical accounts. Tom Hamilton shows how this trial contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in postwar France. People throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers' illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.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

Throughout history, too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to voting. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress's ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all.Drawing on troubling stories of state attempts to disenfranchise military voters, women, African Americans, students, former felons, Native Americans, and others, Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted. He shows how a constitutional right to vote can deescalate voting wars between political parties that lead to endless rounds of litigation and undermine voter confidence in elections, and can safeguard democracy against dangerous attempts at election subversion like the one we witnessed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.The path to a constitutional amendment is undoubtedly hard, especially in these polarized times. A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy (Princeton UP, 2024) explains what's in it for conservatives who have resisted voting reform and reveals how the pursuit of an amendment can yield tangible dividends for democracy long before ratification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law