New Books In Law

From busting drug lords to leading the Pentagon task force charged with bringing the 9/11 terrorists to justice, Mark Fallon has spent his career on the front lines of U.S. national security. My first guest is one of the most fascinating people I've interviewed. Former NCIS Special Agent in Charge Mark Fallon is a national security consultant, scholar, and expert in counterintelligence and counterterrorism who's been involved in some of the most significant terrorism investigations in U.S. history. Mark served more than thirty years in government—twenty-seven with the NCIS and two as a Senior Executive within the Department of Homeland Security. He received numerous awards and medals for his service, including the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Award for Outstanding Achievement and the U.S. Secret Service Director Honors Award. As an NCIS Special Agent, Mark operated undercover in some of the most dangerous places in the world—from infiltrating drug rings in Thailand to capturing poachers in Keny

With rigorous attention to history and empire, Maïa Pal's Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a unique analysis of imperial expansion. Through an analysis of ambassadors and consuls in the Mediterranean—and attention to Castilian, French, Dutch, and British empires—Pal's multifaceted conceptualization of jurisdictional analysis gathers together law and capital in the early modern period. A compelling application of political Marxist frameworks, Jurisdictional Accumulation is a multidisciplinary approach to thinking through extraterritoriality and its implications. Through archival work, theorization, and legal analyses, Pal offers us a novel way to better understand the links between capital, law, and imperial authority. Dr. Maïa Pal is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. Her research brings together international relations theory, international political economy, and histories of international law,

Since American president Donald Trump was elected to a second term, it is common to hear citizens, journalists, and public officials distinguish between the laws and leaders of their states and the national government. Those who oppose Trump’s policies with regard to reproductive rights, gun violence, LGBTQ+, education, police, and voting often present state constitutions, courts, laws, culture, and leaders as a bulwark against Trump’s autocratic rule.  But Professor Stephen H. Legomsky sees it differently. His new book, Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government (Cambridge University Press 2025) argues that – if we care about democracy – we should imagine an America without state government. No longer a union of arbitrarily constructed states, the country would become a union of one American people. Reimagining the American Union understands state government as the root cause of the gravest threats to American democracy. While some of those threats are baked into the Constituti

In today's post-Roe v. Wade world, U.S. maternal mortality is on the rise and laws regarding contraception, involuntary sterilization, access to reproductive health services, and criminalization of people who are gestating are changing by the minute. Today I’m joined by Dr. Caitlin Killian, the editor of and one of the contributors to a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts: A Reader. I’m also pleased to host two of the chapter authors, Drs. Nancy Hiemstra and Jaya Keaney. Using a reproductive justice framework, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts walks students through the social landscape around reproduction through the life course. Chapters by cutting-edge reproductive scholars, practitioners, and advocates address the social control of fertility and pregnancy, the promises and perils of assisted reproductive technologies, experiences of pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, and birth, and how individuals make sense of and respond to the cultural, social, a

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes, often unnecessarily. We also plan to use animals, AI systems, and other nonhumans at even higher levels in the future. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which nonhumans matter, how much do they matter, and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology? In The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why (W.W. Norton, 2025), philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include all potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies. This book explores provocative case studies such as lawsuits over captive elephants and debates over factory-farmed insects, and compels us to consider future ethical quandar

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Dr. Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Professor Philip J. Stern, Professor of History at the History Department at Duke University. Philip is a historian of the British Empire, with an interest in the role of companies and corporations in colonial enterprise, overseas exploration and cartography, the historiography of British India, early modern economic thought, and digital and data visualization approaches to the problem of colonial sovereignty. We spoke with Philip in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his most recent book, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard University Press, 2023). The book places corporations at the centre of the story of the British

In Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. In Geographies of Gender, Dr. Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways

What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police. It's evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris reimagines the world without police to find answers and reveal how we can make police departments obsolete. Beyond Policing tackles thorny issues with evidence, including data and personal stories, to uncover the weight of policing on people and communities and the patterns that prove police reform only leads to more policing. McHarris challenges us to envision a future where safety is not synonymous with policing but is built on the foundation of community support and preventive measures. He explores innovative community-based safety models (like community mediators and violence interrupters), the decriminalization of driving offenses, and the creation of nonpolice crisis response teams. McHarris also outlines strategies for responding to conflict and harm in wa

Data and privacy have emerged as critical issues in our digitally interconnected era, profoundly influencing individual rights, societal norms, and democratic processes. In his book, On Privacy and Technology (Oxford UP, 2025), Daniel Solove provides a compelling exploration of the intersection between evolving technologies and privacy rights. Drawing on insights from law, philosophy, sociology, and communication studies, Solove unpacks the complex ways in which digital innovations challenge traditional notions of privacy and autonomy. The book advances a nuanced argument advocating for a reevaluation of how privacy is conceptualized and protected in an age dominated by data collection, surveillance, and algorithmic governance. In this episode, Daniel Solove discusses how contemporary privacy concerns—ranging from mass surveillance and data breaches to algorithmic bias and digital profiling—can be critically understood and addressed. Grounded in rigorous theoretical analysis, the conversation pushes against t

What is constitutional private law, and how does it differ from the way we traditionally think about constitutional issues? When an individual employed by the government breaks the law, do we sue the person or the government? And what do these choices reveal about justice, accountability, and constitutional interpretation? This week Madison’s Notes welcomes Garrett West, Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, for a deep dive into constitutional private law, an often-overlooked dimension of constitutional theory. While most discussions focus on government power and structure, this episode explores how constitutional principles might extend into private relationships and disputes. West breaks down essential legal vocabulary, examines unexpected historical shifts in constitutional doctrine, and analyzes how courts have grappled with applying constitutional norms beyond the state. From torts and remedies to federal courts and administrative law, this conversation challenges conventional boundaries and ask

Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing customers with cheap goods and speedy delivery. Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy (Princeton University Press, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of American retail capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today, uncovering the roots of a bitter equilibrium where large low-cost retailers dominate and vast numbers of low-income families now rely on them to make ends meet. Offering a comparative perspective on the history of American political economy, Dr. Kathleen Thelen shows how large-scale retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden faced a far less hospitable regulatory environment than companies in the United States, which enjoyed judicial forbearance and often active government support. As American companies grew in scale and scope, they assembled an ever-expanding political

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debate. James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (University of Arizona Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Canessa & Dr. Manuela Lavinas Picq takes the provocative view that Indigenous people have been fundamental to how contemporary state sovereignty was imagined, theorized, and practiced. Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, this open-access book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book

Though European administrative laws have gained global significance in the last few decades, research which provides both theoretical analysis and original empirical research has been scarce. The Common Core of European Administrative Laws Retrospective and Prospective (Brill/NIjhoff, 2023) an important account of the evolution of judicial review and administrative procedure legislation, using a factual analysis to shed light on how the different legal systems react to similar problems. Discussing the concept of a ‘common core’, Giacinto della Cananea reveals the commonalities in, and differences between, the foundational assumptions of European administrative adjudication and rule-making. This is the fourth book in the series, Comparative Law in Global Perspective published by Brill Niehoff, and it is available open access here. Giacinto della Cananea is a full professor in the department of law at the University of Bocconi. He holds a PhD in European law from the European University Institute (1994) and a l

What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024).  Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, a prolific scholar of Russian and Jewish literature and cinema, the memoirs tell the rich and poignant story of Goldis’s life and what it took for a Jew to navigate and survive in the halls of Soviet power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The presidents of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians join the podcast to talk about the effects of historical censorship, data shredding, meaningful public education – and what everyone can do to fight back. After being sworn in as the 47th president, Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders. The order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” declares that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality...” This order has swiftly affected what people may read on websites or museum panels that describe historical events and artifacts. As a new joint statement from the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians recounts, “Some alteration

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with scholars about recent books engaging with different aspects of global corporations – with a focus on the role of law and legal forms. Our guest today is Dr. Joshua Ehrlich, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Macau. Josh is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. We spoke with Josh in a live event as part of a workshop in Hong Kong on the history of companies in Asia about his first book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book is a deeply researched and well-written account of how East India Company officials developed and deployed ideas about knowledge to bolster its own authority, and to manage the transition from corporate sovereignty towards unitary s

Rule of law faces serious threats to its viability in many countries. It has become a recurring topic in the media and is affecting our daily lives. To understand better the meaning of rule of law, the stakes, and how governments and citizens can respond to today’s challenges, we must return to first principles. In Law’s Rule (Oxford U. Press, 2022), eminent philosopher of law Gerald Postema draws on a lifetime of research and thought to articulate and defend a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling conception of the rule of law and defend it against serious challenges to its intelligibility, relevance, and normative force. The rule of law's ambition, Postema argues, is to provide protection and recourse against the arbitrary exercise of power using the distinctive tools of the law. Law provides a bulwark of protection, a bridle on the powerful, and a bond constituting and holding together the polity and giving public expression to an ideal mode of association. Two principles immediately follow from this cor