Episodes

  • Cary Nelson, "Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

    Cary Nelson, "Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
    Sep 4 2024
    Completed shortly before Hamas carried out its barbaric October massacre, Cary Nelson's Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (Academic Studies Press, 2024) takes up issues that have consequently gained new urgency in the academy worldwide. It is the first book to ask what impact antisemitism has had on the fundamental principles the academy relies on for its identity—academic freedom, free speech rights, standards for hiring or firing faculty members and administrators, and the ethics of academic conduct and debate. Antisemitic hatred is spreading at a fever pitch. What steps can counter it? What damage to students is done when departments embrace anti-Zionism? Should faculty members face consequences for promoting antisemitism on social media? Should universities make a new push to adopt the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism? 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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    41 mins
  • Dr. Alexandre Caeiro on the Politics of Islamic Law and Institutions in Qatar

    Dr. Alexandre Caeiro on the Politics of Islamic Law and Institutions in Qatar
    Sep 4 2024
    An interview with Dr. Alexandre Caeiro in which we discuss Islamic law and institutions in Qatar, secularisation and the Ottomans. 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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    20 mins
  • Jonathan Gienapp, "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique" (Yale UP, 2024)

    Jonathan Gienapp, "Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique" (Yale UP, 2024)
    Sep 3 2024
    The legal theory of constitutional originalism has attracted increasing attention in recent years as the US Supreme Court has tilted with the weight of justices who self-describe as originalists. In Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale UP, 2024), Jonathan Gienapp examines the theory and describes how it falls short of achieving the interpretive authority that it claims. Gienapp asserts that we need to reconstruct 18th century legal arguments as they were originally understood before judging them, while originalists reject historical understanding in favor of a more pliable textualist approach that allows them to impose their modern legal perspectives onto the past. This "have your cake and eat it too" methodology allows originalists to claim the authority of the Founders while simultaneously discounting anything that those same Founders may have said, done, or understood that doesn't appear among the approximately 7500 words of the Constitution itself. This book speaks directly to originalists with a challenge to make a fundamental choice between recognizing how our modern constitutional practices distort the original constitution and embrace them for the modern fiction that they are, or recover the original Constitution that the Founders actually knew. Author recommended reading: The Interbellum Consitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale UP, 2024) by Alison L. LaCroix Related resources: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn Edwin Meese speech to the American Bar Association in 1985 Constitutional Faith by Sanford Levinson New Books Network interview with Jonathan Gienapp, when Derek Litvak spoke with him in 2019 about The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard UP 2018). 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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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

    Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
    Aug 27 2024
    Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americans, it took far less time for courts to recognize marriage and adoption rights or workplace discrimination protections for queer people. The legal and political success of LGBTQ+ advocates often depended upon presenting sexual and gender identities as innate – or “immutable” to fit legal categories. Conservatives who oppose LGBTQ+ equality often argue that sexual and gender identity is something that can be taught. They use the offensive language of “grooming” and contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children. In Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Joanna Wuest unpacks how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality– based on arguments from the “natural sciences and mental health professions” – became central to American LGBTQ+ advocacy. Her book is both a “celebratory and cautionary” story about the costs of relying on science to win impressive victories for queer rights. The book interrogates the “LGBTQ+ rights movement, the scientific study of human difference, and the biopolitical character of citizenship that formed at the nexus of the two.” As LGBTQ+ advocates brought “science to bear on civil rights struggles,” they transformed American politics and the epistemology of identity politics more broadly.” Dr. Joanna Wuest is an incoming Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a sociolegal scholar specializing in sexual and gender minority rights, health, and political economy. Her book, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Social Studies of Science's 2024 Rachel Carson Prize and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab. During the podcast, we mentioned: Joanna’s article with Dr. Briana S. Last, “Agents of scientific uncertainty: Conflicts over evidence and expertise in gender-affirming care bans for minors” in Social Science & Medicine. 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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    57 mins
  • Damaging Rationality: Exxon-Funded Legal Research and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

    Damaging Rationality: Exxon-Funded Legal Research and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
    Aug 25 2024
    This is part #3 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast mini-series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the last episode of the (ir)Rational Alaskans, Riki Ott, Linden O’Toole, and thousands of other Alaskan fishers won over $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In our finale, while Ott and O’Toole wait for their cheques, Exxon fights back with a legal and academic appeal. In that appeal, they marshal some of the most-respected scholars of our generation. The (ir)Rational Alaskans is a partnership with Canada’s National Observer. You can also read about this story in Jacobin. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page. Programming Note: This marks the end of our returning season, the Rationality Wars. We will back with another season shortly, sometime this fall. If you want to catch that season, make sure to stay subscribed to our podcast feed (Apple, Spotify, RSS). You can also stay updated by following us on X (@citedpodcast), and you can contact us directly at info [at] citedmedia.ca if you have any questions or any feedback. Finally, if you are impatient and just itching for more content, check out some of our other episodes, like: the other episodes in this season, if you joined up late; the episodes from last season, especially America's Chernobyl; or some of the highlights from our other podcast, Darts and Letters. 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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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Wesley G. Phelps, "Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement" (U Texas Press, 2023)

    Wesley G. Phelps, "Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement" (U Texas Press, 2023)
    Aug 24 2024
    In 2003, in a ruling that bordered on poetic, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Lawrence v. Texas that sexual behavior between consenting adults was protected under the constitutional right to privacy. This was a landmark case in the course of LGBTQ+ rights in the Untied States, laying the groundwork for cases like 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges. Yet, this case did not emerge out of nowhere. In Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement (U Texas Press, 2023), University of North Texas history professor Wesley Phelps argues that behind each successful court case stands a litany of failures, challenges, and individual human stories, each of which laid the groundwork for these landmark successes. By tracking the long history of queer activism in Texas during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Phelps shows how the long road toward greater LGBTQ+ civil rights was paved with hard work by hundreds of activists, lawyers, and allies. No movement exists in a vacuum, and Before Lawrence v. Texas provides a roadmap showing how historical change really occurs. 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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    1 hr
  • Gary Mucciaroni, "Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

    Gary Mucciaroni, "Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
    Aug 24 2024
    Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. In Answers to the Labour Question: Industrial Relations and the State in the Anglophone World, 1880–1945 (University of Toronto Press, 2024), Dr. Gary Mucciaroni examines five Anglophone nations – Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States – whose differences are often overlooked in the literature on political economy, which lumps them together as liberal, “market-led” economies. Despite their many shared characteristics and common historical origins, these nations’ responses to the labour question diverged dramatically. Dr. Mucciaroni identifies the factors that explain why these nations developed such different industrial relations regimes and how the paths each nation took to the adoption of its regime reflected a different logic of institutional change. Drawing on newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, and personal memoirs, among other sources, Answers to the Labour Question aims to understand the variety of state responses to industrial unrest and institutional change beyond the domain of industrial relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Ren Pepitone, "Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Ren Pepitone, "Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Aug 22 2024
    How did ideas of masculinity shape the British legal profession and the wider expectations of the white-collar professional? Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ren Pepitone examines the cultural history of the Inns of Court – four legal societies whose rituals of symbolic brotherhood took place in their supposedly ancient halls. These societies invented traditions to create a sense of belonging among members – or, conversely, to marginalise those who did not fit the profession's ideals. Dr. Pepitone examines the legal profession's efforts to maintain an exclusive, masculine culture in the face of sweeping social changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilising established sources such as institutional records alongside diaries, guidebooks, and newspapers, this book looks afresh at the gendered operations of Victorian professional life. Brotherhood of Barristers incorporates a diverse array of historical actors, from the bar's most high-flying to struggling law students, disbarred barristers, political radicals, and women's rights campaigners. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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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    58 mins