New Books in Law

New Books Network
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Aug 23, 2021 • 1h 7min

Rebecca Hamlin, "Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move" (Stanford UP, 2021)

When we talk about people crossing borders, policy makers, advocates, journalists, and academics often distinguish between “refugees” and “migrants.” Is this a useful legal fiction? Shorthand for an important distinction? Dr. Rebecca Hamlin argues that employing this binary limits protection for vulnerable people who are not protected by the rarified category of “refugee.” In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford UP, 2021), Dr. Hamlin confronts the binary -- and the effect it has on our study, policy-making, and conversations about border crossers. Her book traces the emergence of the concept of refugee in the context of sovereignty and colonialism, pushing back on notions of essentialism in favor of a constructed binary. The logic of the migrant/refugee binary obscure power imbalances by focusing on internal explanations for why people are leaving countries in the Global South (corruption, war, poverty) rather than externalist forces such as globalization, postcolonialism, and neoliberalism. Using varied data and methods, she provides insight into the scholarly fault lines and the historical and current role of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) in perpetuating the binary. Her rich case studies reveal differences in how the binary is deployed in the Global North and South. Beautifully written and carefully argued, Dr. Hamlin challenges scholars and advocates for vulnerable border crossers to move beyond the binary, despite perceived risks.In the podcast (recorded days after the fall of the Afghan government), Dr. Hamlin reflects on the continuing effects of the binary in contemporary events -- and how it limits creative scholarship, policy-making, journalism, and conversation about vulnerable border crossers. She mentions Claudio Saunt’s Norton book, Unworthy Republic and also the Hamlin-Abdelaaty Migrants or Refugees? It's the Wrong Question published in the Monkey Cage.New Books in Political Science welcomes Dr. Lamis E. Abdelaaty as a part of this dynamic conversation and we look forward to new podcasts from Dr. Abdelaaty in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 20, 2021 • 53min

Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. In The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021) historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect on Twitter @ProfCAndersonDr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 18, 2021 • 54min

Amy J. Rutenberg, "Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2019) draws the curtain on the race and class inequities of the Selective Service during the Vietnam War. Amy J. Rutenberg argues that policy makers' idealized conceptions of Cold War middle-class masculinity directly affected whom they targeted for conscription and also for deferment. Federal officials believed that college educated men could protect the nation from the threat of communism more effectively as civilians than as soldiers. The availability of deferments for this group mushroomed between 1945 and 1965, making it less and less likely that middle-class white men would serve in the Cold War army. Meanwhile, officials used the War on Poverty to target poorer and racialized men for conscription in the hopes that military service would offer them skills they could use in civilian life.As Rutenberg shows, manpower policies between World War II and the Vietnam War had unintended consequences. While some men resisted military service in Vietnam for reasons of political conscience, most did so because manpower polices made it possible. By shielding middle-class breadwinners in the name of national security, policymakers militarized certain civilian roles—a move that, ironically, separated military service from the obligations of masculine citizenship and, ultimately, helped kill the draft in the United States.Amy J Rutenberg is Associate Professor of History and Co-Coordinator of the Social Studies Education Program at Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in Cold War History, The New York Times, and TheAtlantic.com.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US military intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 18, 2021 • 1h 5min

Justin Marceau, "Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice interventions against animal abusers. More prosecutions and longer sentences, it is argued, will advance the status of animals in law and society. In Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment (Cambridge UP, 2019), Professor Justin Marceau demonstrates that a focus on 'carceral animal law' puts the animal rights movement at odds with other social justice movements, and may be bad for humans and animals alike. Animal protection efforts need to move beyond cages and towards systemic solutions if the movement hopes to be true to its own defining ethos of increased empathy and resistance to social oppression. Providing new insights into how the lessons of criminal justice reform should be imported into the animal abuse context, Beyond Cages is a valuable contribution to the literature on animal welfare and animal rights law.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 17, 2021 • 1h 32min

Charles Foster, “Defined By Relationship” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Defined By Relationship is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Charles Foster, who is a writer, traveller, veterinarian, barrister, philosopher and Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. This wide-ranging conversation provides a detailed exploration of several of his books in many different fields with a particular focus on Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law and the New York Times Bestseller Being a Beast.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 16, 2021 • 1h 8min

Camillia Kong, "Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-Making, Dialogue, and Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), challenges the current legal landscape of mental capacity law and human rights legislation, arguing that assessments of mental capacity should take account the role of relationships in the decision-making capacity of individuals with impairments and mental disorders. Dr. Camillia Kong's is an interdisciplinary exploration, combining philosophy, legal analysis on the law of England and Wales, the European Convention of Human Rights, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Kong defends a concept of mental capacity, but one which at times provides scope for justifiable interventions into disabling relationships. The implications of Kong's hypothesis are groundbreaking; she provides a framework which articulates the practice of capacity assessments to help to better situate, interpret, and understand the decisions and actions of people with impairments. This monograph is the basis of another publication (co-written with Alex Ruck Keene) Overcoming Challenges in the Mental Capacity Act 2005: Practical Guidance for Working with Complex Issues (Jessica Kingsley, 2018). You can listen to that interview with Dr. Kong and Ruck-Keene here.Dr Camillia Kong is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice, Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the Principal Investigator of Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law.Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 13, 2021 • 1h 37min

Katy Faust and Stacy Manning, "Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement" (Post Hill Press, 2021)

Children have the right to be raised by both their mother and father. That used to be a noncontroversial idea. But no longer.In their eye-opening 2021 book, Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children's Rights Movement (Post Hill Press, 2021), Katy Faust and Stacy Manning examine how children have been damaged by such developments as no-fault divorce, marriage equality, and the largely unregulated fields of surrogacy and in-vitro-fertilization.They argue that in the quest for the satisfaction of the desires of adults (the “Us” of the title), children (the “Them” of the title) have been treated as afterthoughts and made into tiny cheerleaders for lifestyles that have deprived the child of either a father or a mother by design.The authors quote extensively from a broad range of now adult children of same-sex couples, surrogacy and children of “donors” of sperm or eggs—which are not usually donated but bought and paid for. These personal testimonies are heartbreaking and expose the cost to the children of these arrangements and technologies.One example from a woman conceived via egg donation:It bothers me that I cost money, that the one woman I want most in this life is a stranger yet 50 percent of me. Sometimes I wish I weren’t born. I didn’t ask for this, and I never would have consented to it.The child of a male same-sex couple says:My five-year-old brain could not understand why I didn’t have the mom that I suddenly desperately wanted. I felt the loss. I felt the hole. As I grew, I tried to fill that hole with aunts, my dads’ lesbian friends, and teachers. I remember asking my first-grade teacher if I could call her Mom. I asked that question of any woman who showed me any amount of love and affection. It was instinctive. I craved a mother’s love even though I was well loved by my two gay dads.This is an invaluable, gripping record in their own words of the trauma inflicted on children of this brave new world. They are moving documents that show the dark side of social and scientific changes that are often lauded as utterly desirable and unproblematic.Faust and Manning detail the repercussions of three categories of intentional parental loss: children who experienced divorce and abandonment, children with LGBT parents, and children born of surrogacy and via sperm and/or egg donation. They point out, for example, the startling contrast between adoption (heavily regulated) and surrogacy (basically, shockingly unregulated).This is an expose of historic importance. It should be read by anyone interested in the fields of bioethics, sociology, psychology, child development, law, public policy, gender studies and concerned about the fate of children born of reproductive technologies or raised intentionally without a mother or a father. The ramifications of these vast and sudden changes have not been addressed sufficiently or candidly outside of conservative scholarly circles.A crucial readership for this book is that of would-be parents considering having children outside of a traditional marriage or producing children via sperm or egg donation. Read what the children of such arrangements say of their lifelong pain and feelings of loss before you rush into a parenthood that cannot take place without intentional biological parent deprivation.We’ll talk today with Katy Faust, the founder and director of Them Before Us and the co-author of this important book about the rights of children.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 13, 2021 • 51min

Samantha Barbas, "The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advocacy of free speech – an advocacy that established the case law on which much of the subsequent jurisprudence is based – stands in stark contrast with his opposition to communism and his longstanding support for J. Edgar Hoover and his anticommunist campaigns. In The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade (U Chicago Press, 2021), Samantha Barbas explores these contradictions to better understand Ernest and his legacy for our times. The son of Jewish immigrants, as a young man in college Ernst developed a gift for argumentation and an interest in progressive politics. Entering private practice after earning his law degree, he developed a reputation as a free speech crusader during the 1920s thanks to a series of high-profile legal victories and his leadership within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet even while developing a national reputation as a liberal attorney Ernst adopted a strident opposition to communism that sometimes put him at odds with his peers. Such was his antipathy to it that he emerged as one of Hoover’s most visible defenders on the left in the 1940s and 1950s, even supplying the FBI director with insider information on ACLU activities. As Barbas explains, such activities reflected his desire to remain relevant at a time when his greatest achievements increasingly lay behind him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 12, 2021 • 1h 29min

Nita Farahany, “Neurolaw” (Open Agenda, 2021)

Neurolaw is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nita Farahany, Robert O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Nita Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. This wide-ranging conversation examines the growing impact of modern neuroscience on the law, deepening our understanding of a wide range of issues, from legal responsibility to the American Constitution’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Aug 9, 2021 • 55min

Megan Goodwin, "Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct? Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities? Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? In Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers UP, 2020), Megan Goodwin argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

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