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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.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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Today I'm speaking with Mordecai Kurz, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. We are discussing his latest book, Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, 2026). After its high-water mark several decades ago, democracy's status continues to slide globally. Capitalism and democracy, which once seemed to complement each other, now appear at odds. Free-market policies and monopolistic technologies have enriched many while driving inequalities that harm workers. Many have opined on how to fix the political and economic problems of our day, from an embrace of radical libertarian policy to socialist ownership of the means of production. Mordecai Kurz's extensive study of capitalism and democracy charts a path for balancing economic and political freedom. Since the days of Adam Smith, technology has changed rapidly, necessitating new formulations that take into account the private power centers that exercise control much like monarchies did in the Age of Enlightenment. Despite the imbalance, capitalism still remains a driver of technological progress and innovation. How can we make both capitalism and democracy work for the good of everyone? I'm happy today to get the chance to speak with such an illustrious scholar and to learn a bit more about how to understand this defining puzzle of our age.Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they
immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full
legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights
worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila
Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and debates to argue that
both the laws of American citizenship and Jews’ position in them changed
repeatedly across the twentieth century. Courts, policymakers, and the
public persistently asked what it meant to be Jewish under the law. Were
Jews a race, a nationality, a religion—or some combination of each? The
answer carried profound legal consequences. Not only did it determine
Jews’ citizenship status, but it also affected the rights they could
exercise. Just as significantly, the meaning of the categories under law
changed over time, affecting Jews’ self-understanding, their political
ideals, and their relationships to other groups of Americans.Who Is American? tells a history that resonates powerfully with
today’s high-stakes battles over citizenship and rights. As Berman
concludes, citizenship law has always been better at posing questions
about the terms of belonging than at providing any ultimate resolution.
The tangled story of Jewish citizenship demonstrates the limits of law
and explains why the United States continues to fall into new and,
often, unsettling debates about who is American.
Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of
American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the
Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit.
Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish
migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a
Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National
University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.
Mentioned in this episode:
Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
William E.
Forbath, “Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish
American Liberalism,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-140.
Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds., Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Posen Library Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative: https://www.posenlibrary.com/Jewish-Studies-Curriculum
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A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of
hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are
excluded from traditional benefits and career ladders.
Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly
reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and
protections that have traditionally come with employee status,
businesses are turning to tactics that let them treat people as
interchangeable parts, to be used and discarded as needed. Drawing on an
original survey of over 6,000 workers, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment (Harvard University Press, 2026) reveals
the striking extent of this transformation across the occupational
hierarchy, affecting everyone from janitors to nurses.
Paul Osterman identifies three distinct categories of disposable
workers: contractors, freelancers, and marginal employees. The marginal
category, unique to Osterman’s analysis, describes workers who are
employees from a narrow legal standpoint but are held at arm’s length by
their firm—left without job security, skill training, or opportunities
for promotion. Many low-wage service workers toil in marginal jobs, but
so do white-collar professionals such as adjunct university faculty and
staff attorneys at law firms. When the three categories are added up,
they account for more than 35 percent of the American workforce.
Not all disposable workers object to their arrangements. But most
contractors and marginal employees would prefer standard employment, and
there is a significant cost to their current status. In response, Disposable Workers
offers a range of policy recommendations, including mechanisms to
prevent over-reliance on contracting and freelancing as well as reforms
to improve job quality for part-timers and marginal employees. As the
deconstruction of employment affects more and more workers, the
importance of such measures will only grow.
Paul Osterman is Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management
at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His numerous books include Good Jobs America, Who Will Care for Us? (Russell Sage, 2011); and The Truth about Middle Managers (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), Who Will Care For Us: Long Term Care and the Long Term Workforce (Russell Sage,2017), Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America (Beacon Press, 2003); Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market: How It Has Changed and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Working In America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market (MIT Press, 2001).
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The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France (Princeton UP, 2026) is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon. Acclaimed historian Jeremy D. Popkin brings this often-forgotten story to life, highlighting the arguments put forward by French abolitionists and their opponents and the profound repercussions of the first abolition of slavery in a Western empire.When the French revolutionaries passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, they immediately faced a burning question: did that document’s first article—“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—apply to the 800,000 enslaved Black people in the country’s colonies? Over the next dozen years, revolutionary leaders fought over this question. The First Emancipation tells how French lawmakers initially protected slavery in their constitution but reversed themselves in 1794, making France the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire. Yet only eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon tried to force the emancipated Black populations of the colonies back into slavery. His decision led to his first major military defeat and to the proclamation of the independence of the Black nation of Haiti, but also to the reestablishment of slavery in other French colonies, where it would not finally be abolished until 1848.The story of how France emancipated its enslaved people and declared them full citizens only to return many of them to bondage, The First Emancipation reveals that the course of abolition in the modern world was more winding and halting than is often remembered.
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Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Kate Dannies examines the gender and family dimensions of mobilisation for the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, situating the war in a long-nineteenth-century social history of Ottoman military reform for the first time. It focuses on the military legal concept of muinsizlik (sole breadwinning) and how this concept shaped Ottoman military policy – namely, how militarisation and mobilisation were supported by the exploitation of women’s care and social reproductive labour, as well as the extraction of material and physical resources from Ottoman families.
In exploring how war worked at the level of the body, the individual and the family, this book demonstrates how Ottoman society and war became imbricated through processes of militarisation that led to significant consequences during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on a gendered reading of Ottoman military and bureaucratic archives, it addresses a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Middle East that has long awaited further study from a bottom-up perspective.
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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The United States has traditionally been a great promoter of international justice – forging the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II and leading the way in creating tribunals to address genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda after the Cold War. Yet the US views the International Criminal Court – the culmination of the tribunal-building process – as a dire threat.
The US voted against its establishment, passed legislation threatening to invade The Hague, and tried to destroy the ICC with economic sanctions. Delving into the uneasy relationship between the world's superpower and one of its most prominent international institutions,
Above the Law: The United States and the International Criminal Court (Cambridge UP, 2026) explains how the desire to shield American soldiers from unwanted ICC scrutiny is the ultimate source of tension. Offering a sophisticated analysis of the ICC's track record that shows how American fears are overblown, Daniel Krcmaric argues that a more cooperative US policy toward the ICC would benefit both sides.
Our guest is Daniel Krcmaric, an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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Now more than ever, the international community plays a central role in pressing governments to hold themselves to account. Despite pressure to adhere to global human rights norms, governments continue to benefit from impunity for their past crimes. In an age of accountability, how do states continue to escape justice?
Escaping Justice: Impunity for State Crimes in the Age of Accountability (Cambridge UP, 2025)presents a theory of strategic adaptation that explains the conditions under which governments adopt transitional justice without a genuine commitment to holding state forces to account. Cyanne E. Loyle develops this theory through in-depth fieldwork conducted over the last ten years in Rwanda, Uganda, and Northern Ireland. Research in each of these cases reveals a unique strategy of adaptation: coercion, containment, and concession.
Using evidence from these cases, Loyle traces the conditions under which a government pursues its chosen strategies and the outcomes of transitional justice.
Our guest is Professor Cyanne Loyle, who is the Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science at Penn State University and a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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In Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremist actors using big data, cyber-mobs, AI, and other threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects – or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights – have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. He critiques conventional theories and provides a framework for predicting, explaining, and evaluating chilling effects in a range of contexts. Urgent and timely, Chilling Effects sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and in the future.
You can find more information about Jon at his website: https://jonpenney.com/
Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
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A woman miscarries and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administers and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are. In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all.
Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched stereotypes. Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Professor Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.
Guest: A wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She uses her Ph.D. in history to explore which stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Reproductive Justice
Stitching Freedom
You're Doing It Wrong
Witchcraft: A History In 13 Trials
The Turnaway Study
The Coroner's Silence
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine
Secrets of the Killing State
Carceral Apartheid
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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Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations.
At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can’t understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen.
Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law’s research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.
In Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Boydell Press, 2025), Jake Dyble explores how General Average worked. It reveals the gap between General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient, universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the evolution of institutions in economic development.
Dr Jake Dyble is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova, Italy.
This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far
from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage
as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want
to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of
divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people
tell pollsters they “have no idea” if they actually will end up married. And unlike in the past, young women are more uncertain than young men.
In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage (Viking, 2026), Stephanie Coontz—author of the “rich, provocative, and entertaining” book Marriage, A History—unravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional earworms that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life.
Coontz
demonstrates that today’s widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more
stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic
insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a
largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us
into a restricted future.
Current public debates about marriage
are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that
marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social
stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz
puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new
research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can
help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage.
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Los Angeles and smog have been synonymous for decades. From the 1940s
through the 1980s, children breathed air so heavy with lead that their
blood was poisoned with it. In 1970, officials declared smog alerts on
235 days. But the last smog alert happened in 2003, and lead has
virtually disappeared from the air. This is the story of how Los Angeles
cleaned up its air.
In Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air (University of California Press, 2026), environmental law expert and LA native Ann Carlson recounts the dramatic policy fights and the
determined scientists, lawyers, and community members who worked
alongside public officials to face off against major polluters and save
their city. In a time of unprecedented climate change and skepticism
about government and science, this book is an inspiring reminder of
what concerned residents, individual leaders, and all levels of
government can achieve by working together.
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 Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty (Duke UP, 2025), Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims' remains for public display. Rwanda's genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms trauma heritage, wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized--made visible in public space--to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by "writing" them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda's genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
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The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the
legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations
of human rights.
Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice.
Our guest is Professor Lawrence Douglas, who is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."
Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.
While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.
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 Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era (Harvard Education Press, 2026), Julie J. Park offers deft analysis of the changes to college admissions and campus life since the US Supreme Court ruled to restrict race-conscious policies in two 2023 cases: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Park offers clear explanations of the rulings, their historical context, and their implications for higher education policy. She highlights how the Supreme Court still allows campuses to consider the role of race in students' experiences and that numerous tools to advance diversity in admissions remain. In this lively, timely work, Park points out the swift and stark post-ruling shifts in campus demographics and grapples with questions of how to push toward a more equitable admissions system. She investigates alternative initiatives, such as test-optional and test-free admissions, percent plans, and others, weighing their merits and drawbacks. She also examines inequality affecting college applications themselves and offers ideas for reform. Integrating up-to-the minute research on admissions, standardized testing, enrollment management, and the campus racial climate, Park recommends actions that can advance equity-oriented access to higher education despite the current restrictions on race-conscious admissions. Park ends with a call to campus leaders, policymakers, and practitioners to reimagine selective college admissions and attendance and offers a glimpse of what the future could hold.
Julie J. Park is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. An expert on race and diversity in higher education, she served as a consulting expert in the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on the side of Harvard.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Copyright, Contract, and Video Games: Terms of Play (Hart Publishing, 2026) uncovers how video game contracts act as monologues of power, moulding players to align with proprietary ideologies.
In the era of interactive technologies, the player emerges as a vital yet curiously overlooked figure. While copyright law governs the creation and distribution of these technologies, it sidesteps the player, leaving private contracts to define their role and obligations. Using video games as a case study, this book fills the gap left by copyright law, offering an innovative socio-legal methodology to interrogate and challenge harmful contractual norms.
By analysing contracts as a form of critical discourse, the book exposes the contradictions and idealisations embedded in these agreements, which often serve to reinforce industry priorities. It is an essential resource for scholars in intellectual property law, video game studies, and socio-legal research, contributing to pressing debates on user rights and the shifting balance of power in interactive industries.
With its fresh perspective on the interplay of copyright, contract, and cultural participation, the book redefines the player's role in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, offering new tools to understand and critique the legal frameworks shaping this most interactive of industries.
Amy Thomas is Lecturer in Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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In Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2020), longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured―as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality.
Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins. Participants' use of nonviolent direct action altered the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina and reverberated throughout the South.
These firsthand accounts include those of the unsung petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton's Briggs v. Elliot, a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter; and the black female employees and leaders who defied a governor and his armed troops during the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston.
Brinson also highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Thomas W. Gaither, Congress of Racial Equality field secretary and scout for the Freedom Rides; Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State College student and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers' strike.
These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians' often violent resistance to change. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress―and hope for the future. For more information on this book, see storiesofstruggle.com
Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches course in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on X @matthewfsimmons.
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