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New Books in Law: Daily Summaries Delivered
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 published research with another expert in their field.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Yesterday51 min
Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany" (Boydell Press, 2025)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 2 days ago46 min
Stephanie Coontz, "For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage" (Viking, 2026)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 4 days ago35 min
Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany" (Boydell Press, 2025)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 1 weeks ago33 min
Ann Carlson, "Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air" (U California Press, 2026)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 1 weeks ago56 min
Delia Duong Ba Wendel, "Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty" (Duke UP, 2025)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 1 weeks ago52 min
Lawrence Douglas, "The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 2 weeks ago1h 2m
Julie J. Park, "Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era" (Harvard Education Press, 2026)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
- 2 weeks ago1h 3m
David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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About New Books in Law
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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