New Books in Law

Ahmet T. Kuru’s new book Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment, A Global and Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a ground-breaking history and analysis of the evolution of the state in Muslim countries. Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, Kuru’s work traces the template of the modern-day state in many Muslim-majority countries to fundamental political, social and economic changes in the 11th century. That was when Islamic scholars who until then had by and large refused to surrender their independence to the state were co-opted by Muslim rulers. It was a time when the merchant class lost its economic clout as the Muslim world moved from a mercantile to a feudal economy. Religious and other scholars were often themselves merchants or funded by merchants.The transition coincided with the rise of the military state legitimized by religious scholars who had little choice but to go into its employ. They helped the state develop a forced Sunni Muslim orthodoxy based on text rather than reason- or tradition based interpretation of Islam with the founding of madrassahs or religious seminaries that were designed to counter the rise of Shiite states in North Africa and counter less or unorthodox strands of the faith. Kuru’s history could hardly be more relevant. It lays bare the roots of modern-day, illiberal, authoritarian or autocratic states in the Muslim world that are characterized by some form of often rent-driven state capitalism and frequently expansionary in their effort to ensure regime survival and increase rents.These states feature education systems that fail to develop critical thinking and religious establishments that are subservient to their rulers. Kuru’s book also in effect describes one of the original sources of the civilizational state that has become a fixture in the struggle to shape a new world order. With his book, Kuru has made an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the stagnation as well as the turmoil that has swept the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Islamic world.James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers.Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020) explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of "employment" reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power, far beyond the ability to hire and fire. Because such arrangements are common across the economy, Hatton argues that coercion—as well as precarity—is a defining feature of work in America today.Theoretically forceful yet vivid and gripping to read, Coerced compels the reader to reevaluate contemporary dynamics of work, pushing beyond concepts like "career" and "gig work." Through this bold analysis, Hatton offers a trenchant window into this world of work from the perspective of those who toil within it—and who are developing the tools needed to push back against it.In this interview, Hatton and I discuss how she chose her unique cases for the book (graduate students, inmates, workfare workers, and college athletes), coercion related to status, agency and resistance, and the often harsh, punitive power of work supervisors and employers. I recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in labor, social stratification, qualitative methods, and culture.Erin Hatton, PhD, is an associate professor in the SUNY Buffalo Department of Sociology. Professor Hatton’s research focuses on work and political economy, while also extending into the fields of social inequality, labor, law and social policy. You can find her on Twitter at @eehatton.Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his newly released book City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Professor Marcus P. Nevius (Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island) tells the interrelated histories of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities.In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth-century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020), Amy Reed-Sandoval reframes the question of immigration justice by focusing on the historical development and lived experiences of socially undocumented identity. Drawing on ethnography, phenomenological analysis, storytelling, and a non-ideal theory approach, she tracks the development of racialized, class-based, and gendered elements of socially undocumented identity and the unjust constraints that target this identity. She looks at concrete steps for how to address socially undocumented oppression, not just at the level of immigration policy, but also through the work of non-state actors and the socially undocumented themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his dazzling new book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Spencer Dew treats his readers to a riveting and often counterintuitive account of the interaction of law, race, and citizenship in the discourses of the Moorish Science Temple and other movements inspired by Noble Drew Ali. How do theological visions of democracy serve as critiques of racism and exclusionary politics? In what ways does a notion of sovereignty as located in faith and outside history mobilize popular sovereignty to critique modern state sovereignty? What are the complicated mechanisms through which legal institutions, texts, and theaters are engaged and negotiated to make space for a notion of citizenship grounded in the entanglement of law, love, and social transformation? These are among the central questions that animate this sparkling study, situated at the intersection of legal studies, African American Religion, and American Islam. Lucidly composed, theoretically charged, and discursively playful, The Aliites is sure to transform the way we look at Noble Drew Ali and his profound and complex legacy. This book will also generate important and productive conversations in various undergraduate and graduate seminars on American Islam, American Religion, Political Studies, History, and Law.SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Today Dennis Baron talks about his new book What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She (Liveright, 2020). Baron is professor emeritus in English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has written many books about language and its connection to culture. What’s Your Pronoun addresses an important cultural question about women’s rights and the rights and identities of non-binary people, and reveals how we got from he and she to zie, hir, and singular they. Pronouns have sparked a national (and international) debate, prompting new policies about what pronouns to use in schools, workplaces and even prisons. Baron describes the historical context of singular they, how the use of generic he was both used to assert women’s suffrage and to deny it, and the use of neo-pronouns throughout the centuries. What’s Your Pronoun? chronicles the role that pronouns play in establishing our rights and identities. Indeed, the relevance of the question “what’s your pronoun” throughout English’s history may surprise you.Carrie Gillon is a linguist, editor and writing coach, working in the academic and healthcare sectors. She’s the author of The Semantics of Determiners (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2103) and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is also the co-host of the podcast The Vocal Fries, a biweekly podcast about linguistic discrimination (or why judging language is not OK). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020) guides the reader through both historical and contemporary considerations of how the American presidency was originally structured and how it has evolved over more than 200 years. This fascinating examination of the presidency starts with the oath of office, as outlined in the Constitution, and explains how Donald Trump, from the very moment he became the 45th president of the United States, was at odds with the constitutional system designed in 1787.Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes, respectively executive editor and editor in chief of Lawfare and both senior fellows at The Brookings Institution, detail the historical basis for what they and many scholars refer to as the “traditional” presidency. This concept of the traditional presidency—which contains both the formal powers of the presidency as outlined in the Constitution as well as the norms and traditions that have taken root within the office over the course of American history—is being replaced, according to Hennessey and Wittes, by the “expressive” presidency. The expressive presidency presents a distinctly different vision of the office itself and essentially replaces the process through which presidential actions are taken and decisions are made with a much more personal approach to the office and the way that it functions.Hennessey and Wittes explain that this reinterpretation of the presidency conflates the person and the office, combining the two in ways that rely much more on the president’s personality and far less on the role of the office within the constitutional system. While the American presidency was unique in the way it combined the role of symbolic head of state and political leader, the transformation of the office by President Donald Trump has, essentially, unmade structural aspects of the office that held these two roles as separate and distinct. As most scholars and students of the presidency know, the office itself has changed in many ways over the course of 45 presidents and more than 200 years. The authors acknowledge this evolution of the office itself and the way that the president’s personality has become more integral to the office, but Unmaking the Presidency argues that the Trump presidency has potentially taken the office off of its constitutional underpinning, and through a variety of norm disruptions and structural changes, has essentially “unmade” the office. Whether it remains on this trajectory or returns to its previous position in some form is dependent on the outcome of the 2020 election.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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (UNC Press, 2019) draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators.Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.Sophie White is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is an historian of early America with an interdisciplinary focus on cultural encounters between Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, and a commitment to Atlantic and global research perspectives.This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In his new book Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Jacob Turner explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can address them. It argues that AI is unlike is any other previous technology, owing to its ability to take decisions independently and unpredictably. This gives rise to three issues: responsibility―who is liable if AI causes harm; rights―the disputed moral and pragmatic grounds for granting AI legal personality; and the ethics surrounding the decision-making of AI. The book suggests that in order to address these questions we need to develop new institutions and regulations on a cross-industry and international level. Incorporating clear explanations of complex topics, Robot Rules will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience, from those with an interest in law, politics and philosophy, to computer programming, engineering and neuroscience.John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Sarah Burns’ new book The Politics of War Powers: The Theory and History of Presidential Unilateralism (University Press of Kansas, 2020) pulls together distinct threads in analyzing the theoretical framing of presidential power in the American constitutional system and then tracing that power through forty-five presidents. Burns begins by assessing Locke’s impact on the constitutional design of the presidency and then turning her attention to the more substantial contributions made by Montesquieu, since Montesquieu had an equally sizeable impact on the Founders and their thinking about this office. There were great tensions at the time of the Founding about the powers that the president has in pursuing war and military engagements. The Politics of War Powers pays close attention to the distinctions made in the Constitution between the role of the legislature in declaring war, and the role of the president in prosecuting war. This is the foundation for Burns’ analysis of presidential implementation of these powers over the course of more than 200 years, and she carefully examines these theoretical foundations, devoting the first third of The Politics of War Powers to unpacking and discussing the competing views of this important and, at times, suspect, power.Following from this theoretical basis, The Politics of War Powers dives into deeply researched explorations of not only the presidents themselves and how they thought about and used their war powers, but also how and where Congress acted and responded. This dimension of the analysis is particularly important to consider, and Burns sketches the ways in which the early Congress exerted its authority and constitutional role in regard to war and the war powers embedded in the Constitution. She then goes on to explore the tension between the executive and the legislature over the course of a number of military engagements that pressed on these competing capacities. The final section of the book outlines the ways in which presidential war powers have grown substantially and the legal reasoning that has grown up around these powers as Congress has stepped back from its own role in regard to war powers. In many ways, The Politics of War Powers is as much about congressional engagement or abdication in its constitutional role as it is about the expansion of presidential power. The delicate balance between the branches has shifted rather substantially, according to Burns’ analysis, and The Politics of War Powers draws out the ways in which this balance has shifted over the course of American history and political development.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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law