New Books in Law

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were Segregated examines the history surrounding how modern housing segregation was purposefully planned out beginning at the turn of the 20th Century. Looking at the intersection of transnational finance, suburban developers, and local, regional, and federal policymaking, Glotzer illustrates the myriad of people and institutions involved in simultaneously creating the idea of the modern suburb and racializing housing.Paige Glotzer is an Assistant Professor of history and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections (Georgetown University Press, 2020), Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown explore how election officials work, how ballots are cast and counted, and how jurisdictions try to innovate while also protecting the security of the voting process.Using original data gathered from state and local election officials and policymakers across the United States, Hale and Brown analyze innovations in voter registration, voting options, voter convenience, support for voting in languages other than English, the integrity of the voting process, and voting system technology. The result is a fascinating picture of how we vote now and will vote in the future.Join us to hear them talk about the book and its implications for the 2020 election.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Although much has been written about the anti-abortion movement in the United States, Jennifer Holland (Assistant Professor of U.S. History, University of Oklahoma) has written the first monograph-length history of the pro-life campaign for American hearts and minds. In her book Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020), Holland explores the development of the movement from the legalization of Roe v. Wade in 1973 to the present with a focus on its cultural, social, political, and religious dynamics particularly in the American West, based in part on 28 oral histories collected from its activists and leaders. In this interview, we discuss the evolution of the movement’s rhetoric and tactics, including the manipulation of histories of oppression including slavery and the Holocaust to further anti-abortion campaigns, the cooption of concepts like morality and ethics, the uses of fetal imagery in protests and promotional materials, the achievement of legislative successes including the limitations placed on abortion access since the Bush years, and the personal as political (and vice versa). Ultimately, Holland argues that anti-abortion activists have won the American culture war, and now likely stand poised for ultimate victory in the coming years.Diana Dukhanova is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Alison D. Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes draw on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women to explore Mayan women’s agency in their search for truth, justice, and reparation for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book discusses the complexities of navigating, negotiating, and interpreting informal and formal justice processes, as participated in and experienced by protagonists, women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries.Jeff Bachman is a senior lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He is the author of the United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the relationship and editor of the volume cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. He is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect, contracted by Rutgers University Press for its Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Political Scientist Daniel Q. Gillion’s new book, The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an incredibly topical and important analysis of the connection between protests and the influence this public activism has on the voting electorate. Tracing the idea of the “silent majority” from Richard Nixon’s characterization of his supporters in the 1960s through to contemporary uses of the term in the 2016 campaign by then-candidate Donald Trump, Gillion examines the construction of this binary framework, that there is a silent majority at home and a vocal minority in the streets, making noise; he also argues that the idea of the silent majority might not apply in our current polarized political world.The Loud Minority brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives to examine protests—weaving together research and analysis from sociology, history, and political science to more fully understand the protests themselves, but to also get at the impacts that protests have, on politicians and elected officials, on donations to campaigns and candidates, on voting behavior, and on policy implementation and shifts in policy directions. Gillion finds that voters are influenced by protests and activism, especially when it happens in close proximity to them. In a way that may be more useful than other information streams, protests provide the electorate with a kind of shorthand that they can then use to connect policy and political actors. Because of the acute partisan polarization within the American political system, protests fit into ideological bends, as Gillion notes in the interview, the protests themselves are linked to one another through the emphasis or policy thrust of the individual protest and the overarching umbrella under which it may be classified. This linkage then becomes a broader scope for voters to use to assess the records of candidates and elected officials on specific concerns.Gillion is exploring the question, throughout the book, of whether protests work and if so, how do they work? The Loud Minority: Why Protests Matter in American Democracy also explains that the answer to the question is not a simple one, necessarily, that the outcome of the protest may not be singular or even initially assessible. This research helps us to understand the potential impact of the many protests we are seeing all around us in the United States (and beyond), while guiding us through the myriad ways that protests act—they are not simple the hours of marching or demonstrating, but the ripples and ramifications of those marches, as the electorate observes and responds, by donating, by voting, by becoming involved in the community, by joining in subsequent protests. Protests are, according to Gillion, “the canaries in the coal mines that warn of future political and electoral change.” Understanding the connection between protests and their influence on the electorate helps us to better understand democracy.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons constitute a crisis of democracy – one that should remind us of past poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical intimidation – that should spur us to action. Uncounted combines law, history, oral history, and democratic theory to illuminate a 21st century, premediated legal strategy to disenfranchise voters of color.In Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression (NYU Press, 2020), Daniels establishes the context of 21st-century voter suppression then focuses on the importance of the Voting Rights Act in discouraging voter suppression – and the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). She elucidates the types – and impacts – of voter deception with attention to possible impacts on the presidential election in 2020. Throughout the work, she connects past and present to demonstrate the radical impact of voter suppression on voting and this is particularly apparent in the chapters on voter purging and felon disenfranchisement.The podcast includes a fascinating discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on voter suppression – particularly regarding absentee voting. Daniels complements her nuanced analysis of the cycles of voter suppression in America with concrete steps for combatting it urging people to educate, legislate, litigate, and participate.This timely book offers an analysis that is both deep and highly accessible. It is simultaneously a work of scholarship and a practical call to action.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). 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 connection between the movement for death penalty abolition and the anti-slavery movement? In Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition (Routledge, 2018), Bharat Malkani, Senior Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University, explores this question. Beginning with an acknowledgment that the death penalty in the United States of America has long been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, Malkani considers the relationships between the two abolitionist movements. He explains how historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. Using the history of slavery and abolition, Malkani argues that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists, offering lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future.Antonia Layard is a professor in Law at the University of Bristol Law School Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t interviews Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam of University of Kentucky on the new book, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019), which explores how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. In this study of how neoliberal ideas limit citizenship for marginalized populations in Hong Kong, Shui-yin Sharon Yam examines how three transnational groups—mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents—engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives.Coupling transnational feminist studies with research on emotions, Yam analyzes court cases, interviews, social media discourse, and the personal narratives of Hong Kong’s marginalized groups to develop the concept of deliberative empathy—critical empathy that prompts an audience to consider the structural sources of another’s suffering while deliberating one’s own complicity in it. Yam argues that storytelling and familial narratives can promote deliberative empathy among the audience as both a political and ethical response—carrying the affective power to jolt the dominant citizenry out of their usual xenophobic attitudes and ultimately prompt them to critically consider the human conditions they share with the marginalized and move them toward more ethical coalitions.I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed chatting with Sharon about this fascinating book. Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Semper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Criminal responsibility is a key-organizing concept of the criminal law, but Arlie Loughnan argues that it needs re-examination. Focusing on the Australian experience, Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2020) questions assumptions about the rise and prominence of criminal responsibility from the late colonial period until recent times. The focus on significant events since the turn of the twentieth century draws out the complexity of criminal responsibility and how its assumed neutrality obscures dynamics of subjectivity, rationality and power in the criminal system.This book will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Anyone interested in legal philosophy, Australian history, criminal law and also discrimination will find this book invaluable. Self, Others and State will make you question what you know about the law and reveal your own assumptions about its doctrines and principles.Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality and criminal law. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law