New Books in Law

Rose Parfitt is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Kent and the author of The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2019). That all states are free and equal under international law is axiomatic to the discipline. Yet even a brief look at the dynamics of the international order calls that axiom into question. Mobilizing fresh archival research and drawing on a tradition of unorthodox Marxist and anti-colonial scholarship, Rose Parfitt develops a new 'modular' legal historiography to make sense of the paradoxical relationship between sovereign equality and inequality. Juxtaposing a series of seemingly unrelated histories against one another, including a radical re-examination of the canonical story of Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, The Process of International Legal Reproduction exposes the conditional nature of the process through which international law creates and disciplines new states and their subjects. The result is a powerful critique of international law's role in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power, and pleasure, accompanied by a call to attend more closely to the strategies of resistance that are generated in that process.Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What is the Administrative State? Where did it come from? Is it a cause for concern or celebration? Adam J. White, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, answers these questions and more. You can read White's Atlantic article "A Republic, If We Can Keep It" here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imaginations, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) is a tour de force that weaves together the various narratives about the transformation of a counter public, in this case, LBGT citizens, into rights bearing citizenship, and the transformation of mainstream political and cultural narratives, incorporating shifting conceptions that open up space for this integration. As Political Scientist Susan Burgess explains throughout the book, a basic exploration of public opinion data reflects the substantial shift that many Americans have had in their thinking about individuals who are part of the LGBT community, and about the community itself. But the public opinion data only goes so far in telling the story of this rapid transformation. Using the American political development framework of political time, Burgess sees profound political transformation, but through what she describes as queered political time, noting that substantive ideas in this context are vitally important. Thus, the focus of LGBT Inclusion in American Life is on the space where narratives and imagination are able to project new ideas that can then open up our thinking and provide opportunities to re-imagine fundamental social and political concepts.Political imagination gives us a chance to consider alternatives; we can see new or different worlds that provide us with different ways to think about institutions and power, about families, about gender and sexuality. This space also provides us with paths into thinking about the future. Burgess focuses on worlds that have been created in popular culture that construct different situations, or that deconstruct our ideas and we can imagine what might come out of that deconstruction. Through plays, television shows, and movies, as are the focus here, we can see power—which is at the heart of politics—differently conceived, implemented, constructed, wielded. Burgess integrates nuanced and important analyses of popular culture artifacts like Bond films, war movies, and family-focused television series to tease apart the shifting ideas of individual and community moral standards (movies about military service), masculinity (Bond films), and the family (Leave It to Beaver, 30something, The Americans). Each section of the book examines the particular theme that is connected to the “central pillars of LBGT freedoms” like the right to marry legally, the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, and the right to have consensual adult sex without fear of criminal penalty. The legality of these rights shifted rather quickly over the past twenty years, and Burgess’ research dives into the connection between popular culture’s imagined spaces and the demand and reality of lived experiences. LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imaginations, and Civil Rights essentially provides the “rest of the story” – analyzing how these spaces of political imagination supplemented Americans’ understandings of the LBGT community and the individuals within that community, not necessarily through representation, but through changing narratives and expansive storytelling and world building.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves―even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.In Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard UP, 2018), Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The relationship between images and truth has a complicated history. In the Western tradition, the Kantian settlement on aesthetic judgment as detached from external interests gave rise to artistic production of images that were read with epistemic authority. But the advent of modernity has at once shaken this certainty and reinforced it. No sooner than we reckoned with the singular history painting and illustrated magazines, we have landed in a mass-media world where any possible image can and does exist.And the more we are surrounded by images, the greater claims they make. Photographs are not only routinely used to convey news, they are used to establish what is and isn’t true. The crime scene photograph is now as likely to be used in a court of law as in a newspaper infographic explainer. The artifact is at once the evidentiary carrier of truth and a visualisation used to confirm it. It creates meaning and it argues for itVisual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics (Routledge, 2022) bridges practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example, in performance and installation art, or photography. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence.David Houston Jones speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the evidentiary and forensic burden of art and photography, the artifice of crime imaging, the visual traces of data, and the ontology of data and objects. Angela Strassheim’s Evidence Melanie Pullen’s Crime Scenes, Hugo’s Camera The death of Alan Kurdi and Ai WeiWei’s restaging of the scene Kathryn Smith’s Incident Room: Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Shroeder, 1949-2012 Luc Delahaye Horace Vernet Trevor Paglen’s Autonomy Cube Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour Julian Charrière’s Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, 2013 Simon Norkfolk’s When I am Laid in Earth Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries, 2003 Interview with Eyal Weizmann and Matthew Keenan on Forensic Aesthetics and the practice of Forensic Architecture Josef Mengele’s bones used in forensic identification Forensic Architecture‘s investigations Interview with Toby Green and Thomas Fazi on The Covid Consensus. David Houston Jones is Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Leigh Goodmark’s new book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (U California Press, 2023), uses the stories of individual criminalized survivors of gender based violence to illuminate the ways that the criminal legal system perpetuates violence against the very women, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people it claims to protect. Leigh argues that reform is not the answer to this problem, and that instead of limiting our efforts and imaginations to the pursuit of reforms that ultimately expand the reach of the criminal legal system, we should invest in abolition feminism and a world of non-carceral supports and resources like housing, healthcare, and education instead of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance (Stanford UP, 2023), Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath uncovers the ways in which intimacies framed as "other" and "offensive" serve to define the very limits of Western tolerance.These regulation efforts, counterintuitively, allow the flourishing of polygamies on the ground. The case studies illustrate a continuum of justice, in which some groups, like white fundamentalist Mormons in the U.S., organise to fight against the prohibition of their families' existence, whereas African migrants in France face racialized discrimination in addition to rigid migration policies. The matrix of legal and social contexts, informed by gender, race, sexuality, and class, shapes the everyday experiences of these relationships. Heath uses the term "labyrinthine love" to conceptualise the complex ways individuals negotiate different kinds of relationships, ranging from romantic to coercive.What unites these families is the secrecy in which they must operate. As government intervention erodes their abilities to secure housing, welfare, work, and even protection from abuse, Heath exposes the huge variety of intimacies, and the power they hold to challenge heteronormative, Western ideals of love.Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (U California Press, 2023) exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations.Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien's book Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (U Minnesota Press, 2021) collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance. Ranging from the historical to the contemporary and grappling with Indigenous land struggles around the globe, these narratives showcase both scholarly and creative forms of expression, constructing a multifaceted book of diverse perspectives that will inform readers while provoking them toward further research into Indigenous resilience.John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. His forthcoming book, Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas), will be out in December 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Better Law for a Better World: New Approaches to Law Practice and Education (Routledge, 2021) I spoke with Dr Liz Curran about the urgent need for innovation in law, legal practice, and legal education. In her book, she challenges the adversarial and hierarchical nature of the legal system, to uncover the harms that these processes and systems cause by the failure to recognise the person behind the legal problem. Drawing on both quantitive and qualitative research, and also her own wealth of experience as a practitioner and educator, Dr Curran offers insights into the way that the legal system fails the most vulnerable. However, the book, is not without hope; it offers models of better practice, and space for further research provide the incentive and innovation necessary to create better law for a better world.Dr Liz Curran is an Associate Professor in the School of Law at Nottingham Trent University.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law