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New Books in Law

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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  • 67 episodes
  • a few times a week
  • Avg 54 min
  • English
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  • S2 · E1485
    Friday · 1 hr 1 min

    Islamophobia and Freedom of Speech with Asim Qureshi, hosted by Chella Ward

    In this episode, Chella Ward interviews Dr Asim Qureshi about the relationship between Islamophobia, the counter-terror framework and freedom of speech. Asim is the Research Director at CAGE International, and the author of numerous important books and articles about Islamophobia, racism and political prisoners including I Refuse to Condemn and A Virtue of Disobedience. His conversation with Chella took place as part of the Islamophobia Awareness Month events at the Open University in 2026. 

  • S2 · E1484
    November 2 · 39 min

    Guantanamo Bay and the Enduring Struggle for Human Rights with Joshua Colangelo-Bryan

    In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, special counsel at Human Rights First and author of Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay (Humanitas Media, 2025). Drawing on his work representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Colangelo-Bryan recounts the legal battles, harsh detention conditions, and personal relationships that shaped his experience. He also reflects on the legacy of Guantanamo, the erosion of due process, and t

  • S2 · E1483
    November 1 · 47 min

    National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles with Carla Chung Mattix (U Nevada Press, 2026)

    The national parks are loved by many Americans and visitors from around the world. Yet, few realize how often these landscapes and their history have been shaped by questions answered in the courts. With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has shaped and defined the character of the parks. Litigation has determined how land can be added to national parks, answered questions about treaty and free speech rights on park land, and settled numerous other disputes

  • S2 · E1482
    October 29 · 42 min

    The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States with Steven Sarson (U Virginia Press, 2025)

    How reading the Declaration of Independence as a document of history explains its intended meaning Thomas Jefferson chose his words carefully. Few could have been more deliberate than “When in the Course of human events,” the phrase with which he opened the Declaration of Independence. As Steven Sarson shows in The Course of Human Events: The Declaration of Independence and the Historical Origins of the United States (U Virginia Press, 2025) , the original Declaration moved through the ages of h

  • S2 · E1480
    October 26 · 46 min

    Carceral Utopia: A Global History of Model Prisons with Gregory Salle (Polity, 2026)

    What underpins the legitimacy of the prison system in the twenty-first century? Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, there is still a widespread belief that prisons can be improved in a socially progressive way. Even today, 'model prisons' are being built that seek to fix the shortcomings and failures of their predecessors, as if past failures were due to a lack of imagination, determination, or resources. The aim of creating model prisons is not new: it dates back to the early nineteenth

  • S2 · E1477
    October 23 · 40 min

    Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive with Pamela Foohey (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    When American churches face financial difficulties, a disproportionately high number of Black churches reorganize under chapter 11 bankruptcy. There are no easy explanations for this distinction: not location, denomination, leadership structure, or the reasons for the loans. In Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (U Chicago Press, 2026), legal scholar Pamela Foohey asks why, then, Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for chapter 11 b

  • S2 · E1476
    October 23 · 59 min

    Terror, Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, with Deana Heath, hosted by Salman Sayyid and Claudia Radiven

    In this episode, Salman Sayyid and Claudia Radiven were joined by Deana Heath to discuss her work Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford UP, 2026). Heath’s work explores the legacies of colonial violence in India, Britain’s colonial amnesia in reckoning with it’s past and how torture was facilitated and systemized. Deana is a scholar of British Imperialism and colonialism, and is also Chair in Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool.

  • S2 · E1478
    October 23 · 45 min

    Human Rights in Psychiatry: Prospects and Dilemmas of Abolishing Coercion in Mental Health Care with Dirk Richter (Springer, 2025)

    In Human Rights in Psychiatry: Prospects and Dilemmas of Abolishing Coercion in Mental Health Care (Springer, 2025), Professor Dirk Richter describes the ethical lines of conflict, shows why coercion can no longer be justified and analyzes the consequences and dilemmas of a possible abolition of coercive measures in psychiatric care. The use of coercion in mental health care is one of the most controversial topics in psychiatric nursing and psychiatry. The conflict line centers around the UN-Con

  • S2 · E1479
    October 22 · 55 min

    Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon with Jennifer L. Brinkley (U California Press, 2026)

    Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint. Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon (U California Press, 2026) by Jennifer Brinkley is the first full-length biography of the New York judge, lawyer, and civil liberties champion whose litigation strategies helped transform the Equal Protection Clause into a powerful tool for women’s rights. Across decades, from the Progressive

  • S2 · E1475
    October 22 · 1 hr

    Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean with Tyler Priest (LSU Press, 2026)

    Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean (LSU Press, 2026) tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, Tyler Priest reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas e

  • S2 · E1474
    October 20 · 54 min

    Disability: A History of Resistance with David Turner (Random House, 2026)

    Despite there being more than 16 million disabled people in the UK today, disability rarely features in mainstream accounts of our past. That absence is not down to a lack of evidence: it is a forgotten, suppressed history – the result of deliberate choices about whose histories matter. This remarkable book rectifies this. Disability: A History of Resistance (Random House, 2026) is a story of resistance and ingenuity, full of people who refused to be silenced or pitied. We meet the labourer who

  • S2 · E1473
    October 18 · 55 min

    Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality with Danny Orbach (Hurst, 2026)

    Why was the Japanese Army so brutal before and during World War Two? This haunting question anchors a sweeping investigation into the moral universe of Imperial Japan’s soldiers, tracing their path from the twilight of the samurai age to the ashes of Manila in 1945. Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality (Hurst, 2026) by Professor Danny Orbach uncovers a world in which war was conceived not merely as combat, but also as justice. Officers and soldiers learned to navigate two rival vision

  • S2 · E1472
    October 14 · 43 min

    Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability with Moritz A. Schramm (Cambridge UP, 2026)

    Social media giants like Meta and transnational regulators such as the European Union are transforming private governance by creatively emulating public law frameworks. Drawing on exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis of Meta's Oversight Board and the EU's Digital Services Act, Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how these approaches blend European and American perspectives, bridgi

  • S2 · E1471
    October 12 · 36 min

    Civil Societies, Uncivil States: Government Repression of NGOs with Suparna Chaudhry (Cornell UP, 2026)

    Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where politics is heading. In Civil Societies and Civil States: Government Repression of NGOs (Cornell University Press, 2026), she shows that states are targeting advocacy organizations less often with violence and more often with laws. These laws cap foreign funding, restrict advocacy, and bury groups in paperwork, to name just a few examples. Becau

  • S2 · E1470
    October 8 · 1 hr 50 min

    Immoral Traffic An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India with Vibhuti Ramachandran (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their effor

  • S2 · E1468
    October 3 · 1 hr 8 min

    Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control with Kelly Lytle Hernández (Norton, 2026)

    Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Michael Stauch to discuss how the US immigration system has always been “racist by design.” Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (Norton, 2026), Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news o

  • S2 · E1469
    October 3 · 29 min

    The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice with Federica Coppola (Cambridge UP, 2026)

    The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly inca

  • S2 · E1467
    September 29 · 1 hr

    Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey's Kurdish Borderlands with Fırat Bozçalı (Stanford UP, 2025)

    The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. Smuggling

  • S2 · E1466
    September 24 · 28 min

    Sara C Bronin, "Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World" (Norton, 2024)

    For those concerned with how city hall can shape the look and feel of a neighborhood, the mere mention of zoning may invite denunciation of zoning practices that contributed substantially to the housing crisis and so limited neighborhood development that you have to get in your car to pick up a quart of milk. In her readable Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton, 2024), Sara Bronin, the Freda Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University, points out if you want to put

  • S2 · E1465
    September 23 · 53 min

    Lee M. Panich and Gustavo Flores, "We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)

    We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions (U Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Lee M. Panich & Gustavo Flores explores how Native people in the southern San Francisco Bay Area—the ancestors of today’s Ohlone community—navigated the collapse of the California mission system. The volume spans from Mexican independence in 1821 through the region’s annexation by the United States in 1846, as Native people from Mission Santa Clara and Mission San José fought for

Showing 1–20 of 67 episodes