New Books in Law

In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters. 

Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge. When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry (U California Press, 2026) excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.

Eric talks with host Emily Dufton about his research techniques, the meaning of Chestnut Lodge and Osheroff's challenge to its care, and the limits of psychiatry.

Emily Dufton is a drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America and Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs. 

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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.  

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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 the troubling parallels between the post-9/11 response to terrorism and the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants today. Their conversation explores what Guantanamo reveals about the fragility of human rights and the enduring importance of legal protections against government abuse.

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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 that have helped determine what the parks look like today. In her new book National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (University of Nevada Press, 2026), Carla Chung Mattix examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks over the course of nearly a century. These cases provide readers with a new lens to understanding the parks and help them understand the role of the courts in the nation's public lands. In this episode, Mattix, who was an attorney for the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of the Solicitor for 25 years, discusses her new book and the Court's influence on the national parks.   

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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 human history from Creation to American independence, assessing it according to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Declaration’s history and historical consciousness therefore help answer one of American history’s great questions: How did the founders reconcile their lofty views on equality and liberty with the inequities and iniquities that they maintained in their time? The contingencies of history and the complexities of natural law, Sarson demonstrates, meant that the Declaration’s eloquent promises of equality and liberty only applied partially to women and poor men, and not at all to Loyalists, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved people. The Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” has since become a promise of universal equality and liberty. As we reach its 250th anniversary, it is important to understand its original context as well as to continue the mission of making its promises a lived reality for all.

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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 century. Ranging from England to Switzerland and Spain, from Russia to China and India, Carceral Utopia: A Global History of Modern Prisons (Polity, 2026) by Dr. Gregory Salle documents a rich, global history of ambitious efforts to create model prisons – places of confinement initially lauded for their progressive ideals but later revealed as fiascos.

At the end of this journey through time and space, it will not suffice merely to highlight the gap between plans and realities, or even to dispel the illusion that model prisons could not live up to their claims. We need to ask why, despite so many failures, these institutions are still being built today. Might their many obvious shortcomings conceal a covert success?

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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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-Convention in the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD). Advocates of the CRPD are pushing for the complete abolition of coercion while opponents see central medical and legal aspects of care for people with mental health problems at risk. Clinicians in conventional psychiatry, including many mental health nurses, primarily justify these measures because of the assumed benefits of coercion-associated care and with the argument that many people affected are unable to make appropriate decisions for their own health in a crisis situation. This argument also applies to human rights, for example by basing coercive measures in the event of suicidality on the right to life. Three central topics are developed in the book. First, it is shown that psychiatric coercion can no longer be justified because the current practice of psychiatric care does not meet the ethico-legal requirements for the use of coercion. Second, a human rights-based approach of psychiatric care is outlined, which is fundamentally based on the will and preferences of people with mental health problems. Third, the consequences and dilemmas are indicated, e.g., the issue of how to deal with suicidality or dementia without the use of coercion. This book is aimed to receive a specific attention from the psychiatric nursing community. It is also relevant to lawyers, human rights practitioners, and mental health professionals more broadly.

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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.

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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 bankruptcy every year. 

Drawing on case studies of six Black churches and one white church, and 150 interviews with church leaders, members, and attorneys, Foohey finds answers in a long history of predatory lending. Unable to negotiate with recalcitrant loan officers, Black churches turn to the legal system to force reasonable concessions from lenders to prevent the stripping of their wealth and the destruction of their communities. While the structural discrimination remains, these churches have found in the bankruptcy system a refuge and some power to fight back.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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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 extraction thus required new institutions of governance. From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean. Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.

Tyler Priest is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the award-winning book The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America and has published in the Journal of American History, Environmental History, Enterprise & Society, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Science. In 2010 he served as a senior policy analyst on the President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Filippo De Chirico is a PhD candidate in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy). His research focuses on the history of the natural gas sector in Italy.

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