New Books in Law

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly liberal philanthropist, they are now center stage in the global rise of the far right, and also lie at the heart of OpenAI, the tech darling that took FTX’s place as the face of the future. In this interview, Morris explains how some of the key thought processes that drive today's techno-billionaires and how we can spot the next fraudsters in our midst.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was The Wrong Man, a bracing drama based on the real-life false arrest of Queens musician Christopher “Manny” Balestrero. Manny's ordeal is part of a larger story of other miscarriages of justice in the first half of the twentieth century. In Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023), attorney Jason Isralowitz tells this story in a revelatory book that situates both the Balestrero case and its cinematic counterpart in their historical context. Drawing from archival records, Isralowitz delivers a gripping account of Manny’ s trial and new insights into an errant prosecution. He then examines how Hitchcock’ s film bears witness to issues that animate the contemporary innocence movement. Given the hundreds of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted in recent years, this genre-bending work of true crime and film history is a must-read.Jason Isralowitz is a partner in the New York office of Hogan Lovells. A Queens native, Jason graduated from Boston University’s College of Communication with a bachelor’s in journalism and holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has practiced law in Manhattan since 1993. Jason lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife, Jennifer.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

James Greenwood-Reeves, a Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds, dives deep into the complex relationship between law, morality, and protest. He explores whether violent protest can be justified, referencing movements like Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter. Greenwood-Reeves argues that when state laws are unjust, citizens may have moral reasons to use violence as a form of expression and protest. He also applies his theories to recent events like the January 6th Capitol attack, challenging conventional views on legitimacy and civil disobedience.

Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with maintaining the law and order, that has led to a normalization of daily violence? These are the key questions that inform the analyses in this volume by lawyers, academics and activists. Divided into four broad sections, it begins by looking at the origins of the modern police force in the 1860s and demonstrates their role in maintaining socio-cultural, economic and political hierarchies even in post-Independence India. The second section explores how the law and legal infrastructure, as well as the bureaucracy in India, work to effectively facilitate police violence and to further marginalize and criminalize certain groups, like lower castes and Muslims. The penultimate section complicates this picture, examining how police violence is shaped by historical ambivalence towards democracy, the personal and systemic dynamics between police personnel and the accused, and the fraught identity of police in conflict zones like Kashmir, where authority is both granted and withheld by the state. The final section contains interviews of and reflections by prominent critics of police violence, including former Haryana DGP V.N. Rai and Abdul Wahid Shaikh, falsely accused of involvement in the 2006 Mumbai blasts. Questioning its foundational purpose and envisioning pathways to accountability and reform, Policing and Violence in India ignites a long-overdue conversation about the nature of policing in India. Deana Heath is Professor of Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool. She has written widely on issues relating to policing and violence in colonial India, particularly on torture and sexual violence. Her latest book, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Jinee Lokaneeta is Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, New Jersey. She is the author of The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India, published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press and Orient Blackswan, and Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India, published by New York University Press in 2011 and Orient Blackswan in 2012. Shailza Sharma is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership.Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other's limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Witchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018.In Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen significant trials to tell the global history of witchcraft and witch-hunts. As well as exploring the origins of witch-hunts through some of the most famous trials from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, it takes us in new and surprising directions. It shows us how witchcraft was reimagined by lawyers and radical historians in France, how suspicions of sorcery led to murder in Jazz Age Pennsylvania, the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary zeal on ‘witches’ in Africa, and how even today a witch trial can come in many guises.Professor Gibson also tells the stories of the ‘witches’ – mostly women like Helena Scheuberin, Anny Sampson and Joan Wright, whose stories have too often been overshadowed by those of the powerful men, such as King James I and ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins, who hounded them.Once a tool invented by demonologists to hurt and silence their enemies, witch trials have been twisted and transformed over the course of history and the lines between witch and witch-hunter blurred. For the fortunate, a witch-hunt is just a metaphor, but, as this book makes clear, witches are truly still on trial.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that explores the foundational understanding of how humans best flourish, in particular in regard to the governmental system under which they live. Allen, author of many books that focus on questions of democracy and justice, also works on democratic reform and renovation at Partners in Democracy. Thus, Dr. Allen integrates both scholarship and democratic activism into her work as an academic and as an activist. Justice by Means of Democracy examines these different threads as well; what is justice, and how does democracy work towards achieving justice? And what is the role of the citizen in these pursuits?Allen opens up her discussion weaving together a number of threads, since politics, economics, civic engagement, and citizenship are all part of the whole when we consider both justice and democracy. Growing out of the ideal that democracy is a very good system for individuals to move forward together, and to achieve their full flourishing, complexities arise from issues like inequality, inequity, and how liberty is structured within the governmental system. Part of Allen’s framing comes from John Rawl’s Theory of Justice and his connection of justice and democracy—but she is pushing further in terms of the role of power and thinking about power and power sharing within democracies and democratic institutions. Justice by Means of Democracy also wrestles with the abstract ideas of negative and positive liberty, and what this actually means in practice, particularly in the United States. In fact, the book thinks about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and what that requires from each individual. Allen explained in our conversation that while we often discuss “work/life balance” in terms of our personal and professional lives, what we should be discussing and focusing on is our “work-life civic balance” – since being civically involved takes time, takes effort, but is required for democracy to function and to remain intact. We are living through some of the breakages within our democratic systems of government, not just in the United States, but in other democracies as well. And part of the reason for these breakages is the failure of democratic practice by the people themselves. Allen’s own activism is focused on restoring and reinvigorating democratic practice, so that citizens become more used to the “habit” of democracy and civic engagement.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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials.The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, Agata Fijalkowski's Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial (Routledge, 2023) examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity.Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn. His recent publications include: “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, forthcoming 2023, ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) “International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Alastair McClure, an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, delves into his book on the intertwining of mercy and violence in British India’s criminal law. He explains how colonial discretion was utilized as a tool of governance that managed social hierarchies. The discussion highlights significant events like the trial of Bahadur Shah II and nationalists like Tilak and Gandhi, who used the state's mercy to challenge colonial authority. McClure links these historical practices to contemporary legal systems, emphasizing their lasting impact on justice.