New Books in Law

By 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 publ... more

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The podcast currently has 1,900 episodes available.

New Books in Law episodes:

July 26, 2026 Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart, "Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The
early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia.
The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution,
and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance
expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage
lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State
(Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry
Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this
politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients
UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.”
These
inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and
engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and
Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate
aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities.
Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of
scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style
nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights
imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing
historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.
Privileging
the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically
involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's
research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the
last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and
ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in
heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical
heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever
looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on
archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and
knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a
decolonizing state.
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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1h 1min
July 25, 2026 Samuel Moyn, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It" (FSG, 2026)
A leading social critic identifies our least-discussed major crisis, and sets out to solve it.
As Americans debate President Biden’s infirmities and President Trump’s erratic behavior, we’ve neglected the bigger problem before us: a massive transfer of power and wealth to the oldest among us, and the curtailment of the prospects of the young. In Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026), the historian and social critic Samuel Moyn offers a piercing diagnosis of our age divide and its consequences. Even apart from the presidency, in legislatures, businesses, and the courts, the average leader’s age has risen dramatically. The elderly predominantly fund campaigns and dominate their agendas, often with the intent to block any challenge to their status. The tax code is rigged on their behalf, as is an economy geared to sheltering financial and housing assets. The United States was founded on the promise of generational renovation but has become an increasingly febrile country of old men.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. With understanding and wit, Moyn shows how elder power can be dismantled. With strong safety nets in place, mandatory retirement ages can be established. The early transfer of assets between generations could be encouraged and young voters can be granted more voice. In such a world, the elderly themselves would be freed from power games to confront the existential opportunities of aging, while the young would find their path to starting out in life unblocked at
last.
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.

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1h 4min
July 25, 2026 Mitra Sharafi, "Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia
(Cornell University Press, 2026) uncovers colonial South Asia's
critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the
government of British India created a web of institutions for the
scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native
mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on uncovering faked
evidence planted by South Asians. These experts, joining toxicologists
known as "chemical examiners," were supposed to extract objective,
scientific truth in the service of British justice. But in trying to
counteract the presumed tendency of colonized peoples to lie, the system
enabled widespread misconduct by state experts, increasing the risk of
wrongful convictions of South Asian defendants. Through scrupulously
documented legal cases, Mitra Sharafi reveals that colonial dynamics put
special pressure on the relationship between truth and justice.
Examining falsity on both sides of the law through the use of testing to
(mis)identify poisons, blood, and spermatozoa, as well as debates over
adversarialism and inquisitorialism in the colonial courtroom, Fear of
the False explores advances in forensic science and shortcuts in
criminal procedure against the backdrop of colonial mistrust. Thanks
to generous funding from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the
ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through
the Cornell Open initiative.
Mitra Sharafi
is a legal historian whose research focuses on South Asia. She is the
Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison and
currently serves as the president of the American Society for Legal
History. She has been the host of the South Asian Legal History Resources website since 2010.
Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS).

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58min
July 23, 2026Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration
In Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (Beacon Press, 2026), civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies insists that those who commit even the most heinous crimes are one of us and should be judged in a spirit of forgiveness. He explains that American society is too often unforgiving, preferring to cast out those we consider irredeemable by fixating narrowly on the question What did they do? and imagining that those who have done great wrongs have no past worth learning and no future worth preserving.
Through intimate interviews, his rich chapters bring to life 6 men and women, sharing their (sometimes brutal) crimes, the grim but all-too-human paths that led them there, and their evolution and insights. Eye-opening and unflinching, Cast Out makes us truly see those society locks away—the so-called “worst of the worst.” It challenges the reader to see us in them and them in us, and in that way, to recognize the humanity we all share.
Guest: Joseph Margulies is a writer, litigator, Professor of the Practice of Law and Government at Cornell University. He was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush (2004), and in Munaf v. Geren (2008). His books include Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power; and Cast Out.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
The Coroner's Silence

Ghost In The Criminal Justice Machine

Hands Up Don't Shoot

Freemans Challenge

The Journal Of Higher Education In Prison

Education Behind The Wall

Secrets Of The Killing State

Stitching Freedom

The Emerson Prison Initiative

The Names Of All The Flowers

Pink Crime

Carceral Apartheid

The Criminal Record Complex
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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1h 3min
July 23, 2026 Dana Burchardt, "The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework" (Hart Publishing, 2026)
Why do some international courts wield broad authority while others face pushback or fade into irrelevance? The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework
(Hart Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Dana Burchardt provides novel
theoretical and empirical insights into this question. It offers a
fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the authority of international
courts, drawing from law, political science and behavioural research.
It
develops, in Part I, a theoretical model and analytical framework for
assessing these questions. The model explains how authority
relationships between courts and their audiences—such as states, NGOs,
individual applicants, and domestic courts—are formed, maintained,
or contested. In Part II, the book applies this analytical framework to
in-depth case studies of two selected international courts: the
European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the Economic
Community of West African States. These studies not only provide deeper
insights into the authority of these courts but also demonstrate
how the analytical framework can be applied to other international
courts to generate an enhanced understanding of international court
authority.
The
book sheds new light on why some courts enjoy enduring authority and
others face pushback, offering powerful tools for understanding the
behaviour of international courts and their audiences.
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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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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58min
July 22, 2026 Debolina Dutta, "A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the
emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model
of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice
of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and
feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take
responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian academic practices. Its
method of conversation and accountability continues the feminist
tradition of taking reciprocity and the time and place of collaboration
seriously. It helps make visible the specific ties between post-colonial
life and law and joins the work of refusing and reimagining the
hierarchical formation of legal knowledge in a caste-based Indian
society. A significant contribution to the history and practice of
feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India, A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2026) will appeal to both an academic and activist readership.
Debolina
Dutta is a Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School's Centre of
Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW)
Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University

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2h 2min
July 19, 2026 Gabriella Soto, "Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026) begins
with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico
border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Moving
between the practical and the philosophical, forensic anthropologist
and author Gabriella Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and
what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of
haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as
objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.
Centered primarily in Arizona and South Texas, Border Afterlives
offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices,
critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and
calls for a re-imagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in
reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that
insists on remembering the dead.
In this conversation, we discuss
the difficult interplay between federal immigration policy and local
practices of death care on the border, the implications of policies that
cause increased death tolls, the politics of humanitarian immigration
reform, and, finally, how allowing ourselves to be haunted by the slow
mass casualties of the border can and should inspire us to act.
Gabriella
Soto is a contemporary archaeologist who examines the material world to
understand pressing social issues. Integrating ethnographic methods,
GIS technology, and archival research, she specializes in migration
materialities, focusing on Latinx migration and security at the
US-Mexico border. Her work analyzes the material footprints of transit,
forensic death investigations, and security and humanitarian
infrastructure. An ACLS fellow whose work has also been funded by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation, Soto is a research affiliate at the Binational
Migration Institute and holds faculty affiliations at Arizona State
University’s School of Transborder Studies, School of Interdisciplinary
Forensics, and the Latinx Oral History Lab. Her research has appeared in
American Anthropologist and Political Geography, and her article on
migrant material culture won the American Anthropological Association’s
Gordon R. Willey Paper Prize. Dr. Soto is the author of Border
Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of
Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026).

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1h 8min
July 17, 2026 Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, "Animals and the Right to Politics" (Oxford UP, 2026)
The assumption that only humans can engage in politics—that only
humans are 'zoon politikon'—is foundational to the Western tradition of
political philosophy. While there is increasing recognition of animals'
moral status (both within moral philosophy and at the level of public
opinion), animals are not recognized as political subjects. This
carefully researched but accessibly written volume—following on from the
authors' earlier book Zoopolis—argues that animals too have a
right to politics: a right to be recognized as political subjects and
agents, and as members of political communities entitled to collective
self-determination. ⁠Animals and the Right to Politics⁠
(Oxford University Press, 2026) draws on recent scientific work on
animal societies, cultures, and decision-making, as well as recent work
by political theorists rethinking ideas of agency and
community—especially the significance of emplaced and embodied
encounters and relationships to the activity of politics. Sue Donaldson
and Will Kymlicka draw a picture of what it would mean to create spaces
and practices, not only for politics conducted by humans on behalf of
animals, but also politics with and by animals on their own terms. It
then explores how this approach could inform a wide range of
contemporary debates in human-animal relations, including wildlife
conservation, urban planning, and animal labour.
⁠Sue Donaldson⁠
is a Canadian author and animal advocate. She has published more than
40 academic articles, and is the co-author, with Will Kymlicka, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(Oxford University Press, 2011) which won the Canadian Philosophical
Association Book Prize in 2013, and has been translated into 11
languages. She is co-convenor of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics,
Law and Ethics research group at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.
⁠Will Kymlicka⁠ is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press, including Contemporary Political Philosophy (2nd ed., 2001), Multicultural Citizenship (1996), and Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(co-authored with Sue Donaldson; 2011). He is currently the Canada
Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Institute for
Advanced Research, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a
Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His works have been
translated into 34 languages.
⁠Kyle Johannsen⁠ is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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1h 49min
July 17, 2026 Renisa Mawani, "Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire" (Duke UP, 2018)
In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru
left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered
by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the
ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months
later were deported to Calcutta.
In Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press, 2018) Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru.
Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that
repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual
stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime
worlds.
Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the
anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's
landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions
between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal
status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and
bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power
through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method
of writing colonial legal history.
The conversation also covers how the book, published in 2018, has
shaped the author’s more recent work as well as how historical methods
and approaches have evolved in the years since publication.
Helen Dewar is an historian of the Atlantic World and French
colonization in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a
professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada) and
the author of Disputing New France: Companies, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
Helen’s institutional website

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56min
July 10, 2026 What are the Limits of Political Speech? A Conversation with Erik J. Olsen
A New Approach to Political Speech: Democratic Theory, Constitutional Law, and Public Liberty After January 6 (de Gruyter, 2026) challenges conventional understandings of political speech and its relationship to democracy. Through a focused case study of Donald Trump's role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election and the prosecutions stemming from it, Erik Olsen develops a critique of the prevailing view that political speech is a private right that is only instrumentally related to political action. He advocates instead for a theoretical framework that treats political speech as a form of communicative action and balances the protection of free expression with the need to safeguard core democratic practices and processes. He thus outlines a more robust First Amendment jurisprudence that can better defend both public liberty and democratic institutions from authoritarian threats in the current era of democratic backsliding.
Erik J. Olsen is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Seattle University.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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1h 18min

FAQs about New Books in Law:

How many episodes does New Books in Law have?

The podcast currently has 1,900 episodes available.

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