New Books in Law New Books Network

Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entanglement with China, and the extent of Germany's dependancies on China in terms of economics, technology, politics and academia. We spoke about the blind spots of policy makers and academics have, and the way that China policy is constructed and interpreted as a result. We also spoke about the implications for national security and German sovereignty, and the way that Germany entanglement with China is a warning sign for democratic states everywhere. 
Dr Fulda is a political scientist and China scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of science. You can listen to an interview about his previous book, The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong KongSharp Power and its Discontents (Routledge: 2019) here. 
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How can the novel be a way to understand the development of nation-state borders? An important work in the intersections of law, literature, history, and migration, Stephanie DeGooyer's Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) offers fascinating insight into understanding naturalization. Tracing the idea of naturalization as it can be understood as a legal fiction and through literary fiction, DeGooyer offers a compelling approach to understanding naturalization as a generative mechanism for national expansion. Through a careful and engaging analysis that spans from Mary Shelley to court proceedings, De Gooyer's Before Borders is a compelling read that will be of great interest for those interested in histories of migration, creative approaches to studying the state, and ways to approach law through and alongside literature.
Stephanie DeGooyer is Assistant Professor and Frank Borden and Barbara Lasater Hanes Fellow in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. Her research focuses on the intersections between law and literature.
Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion.
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In this episode of our occasional series, Postscript, we focus on the Supreme Court’s recently published decisions in two cases, about guns and abortion, but more about how the Executive and Judicial branches of government function in the United States. Constitutional Law scholar (and New Books in Political Science co-host) Susan Liebell takes us through Garland v. Cargill, which focused on the Trump Administration’s implementation of a prohibition against bump stocks for rifles following the deadly shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2017. Liebell, a published expert on the Second Amendment and the long history of gun regulation in the United States, explains the thrust of the case, which is only tangentially connected to the Second Amendment, but calls into question the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm’s (ATF) expertise, particularly in context of the majority opinion’s decision that the ATF was not using its administrative power correctly. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, may signal the Supreme Court’s inclinations towards Chevron deference, which is also before the Court this term in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
Liebell, also an expert on abortion access, reproductive health regulation, and citizenship, explains the Court’s unanimous decision in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, focused solely on the question of standing, and whether the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine actually qualified to bring the case since there was no clear injury that had been sustained in the suit they brought before the District Court in Amarillo, Texas. Thus, the drug Mifepristone, which was to be banned nationwide in the initial court ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, was not banned as a result of this lawsuit brought by the Food and Drug Administration. This case, not dissimilar from Garland v. Cargill, focuses on procedural questions more than it focuses on other issues. And the unanimous decision is about that legal procedure, not about the FDA, or the process to through which drugs are brought to market in the United States, or about the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine’s indictment of the process for prescribing mifepristone. Our conversation threads through these cases, and others (like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and District of Columbia v. Heller) that set the foundation for these cases to come forward.
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In recent years, philanthropy, the use of private assets for the public good, has come under renewed scrutiny. Do elite philanthropists wield too much power? Is big-money philanthropy unaccountable and therefore anti-democratic? And what about so-called "tainted donations" and "dark money" funding pseudo-philanthropic political projects? The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many of these criticisms, leading some to conclude that philanthropy needs to be fundamentally reshaped to play a positive role in our future.
In What is Philanthropy For? (Bristol University Press, 2023), Rhodri Davies examines why it's important to ask what philanthropy is for, as it has shaped our world for centuries. Considering the alternatives, including charity, justice, taxation, the state, democracy, and the market, he explores the pressing questions that philanthropy must tackle to be equal to the challenges of the 21st century.
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In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.
Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind.
Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024).
Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).
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Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears to argue that conservatorships are inherently abusive.
Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia UP, 2023) is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees, Alex V. Barnard takes readers to the streets where police encounter homeless people in crisis, the locked wards where people receiving treatment are confined, and the courtrooms where judges decide on conservatorship petitions. As he shows, California’s state government has abdicated authority over this system, leaving the question of who receives compassionate care and who faces coercion dependent on the financial incentives of for-profit facilities, the constraints of underresourced clinicians, and the desperate struggles of families to obtain treatment for their loved ones.
This book offers a timely warning: reforms to expand conservatorship will lead to more coercion but little transformative care until government assumes accountability for ensuring the health and dignity of its most vulnerable citizens.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.
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