HUMAN RIGHTS

Greenberg, Jessica. Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law, and the European Court of Human Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025. Pp. xx + 231. $28.00 paper. Drawing on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research, Greenberg tracks two paradoxical experiences of the European human rights system and the European Court of Human Rights: on the one hand, the Court as a bureaucratic “machine;” on the other, the Court as the “conscience of Europe.” She argues that human rights frameworks fuel imaginative approaches to social change, and compel legal actors to creatively navigate institutions through advocacy, persuasion, and innovative interpretation of what the law is and what it should be.

LAW AND CAPITALISM

Pistor, Katharina. The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025. Pp. xii + 196. $30.00 cloth. Pistor argues that even though capitalism has been conventionally described as an economic system, it is actually a deeply entrenched legal regime: law provides the material for coding simple objects, promises, and ideas as capital assets; it also provides the means for avoiding the legal constraints that societies have frequently imposed on capitalism.

LAW AND COLONIALISM

Eklund, Hanna, ed. Colonialism and the EU Legal Order. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Pp. xix + 388. $45.00 paper. Available as open access on Cambridge Core. Contributors to Eklund’s volume offer an account of the impact European colonialism has had on the application of law, on the methods of actors, the workings of institutions, and on changes in EU membership over time. Case studies address how colonial continuities in EU law can be identified; how to understand the present application of EU law through the history of colonialism; and how Europe’s colonial history casts new light on EU legal theory and concepts.

LAW AND LABOR

Fliter, John A. U.S. v. Darby Lumber: The Triumph of Fair Labor Standards. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2025. Pp. viii + 216. $29.99 paper. Fliter presents the story of U.S. v. Darby Lumber, a landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1941 that upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. Darby was a major triumph for the US labor movement.

Tippett, Elizabeth Chika, The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025. Pp. iv + 280. $29.95 paper. Tippett combines historical context with contemporary case studies and interviews to argue that modern US law and management practices are steeped in three core principles of traditional master-servant law: the right to control, the right to govern, and the duty of support.

LAW AND RACE

Lew-Williams, Beth. John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025. Pp. iv + 359. $34.00 cloth. Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, Lew-Williams examines anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life. She finds that legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, when California passed a tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor; over the next seventy years, western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled their Chinese residents, creating a legal architecture redolent of Jim Crow.

LAW AND RELIGION

Tous, Sajjad Adeliyan and James T. Richardson. Managing Religion and Religious Changes in Iran: A Socio-Legel Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. i + 72. $23.00 Open access available. Tous and Richardson consider the ways that alternative and emergent religious and spiritual movements are managed by law and legal mechanisms in the authoritarian theocracy of Iran. The development of religious diversity in Iran, fostered by the cultural diffusion of Western writings and ideas, has led to social control efforts over any religious and spiritual movement differing from the regime’s view of Islam, culminating in the passage of a piece of stringent legislation in 2021.

LAW AND TAXATION

Madoff, Ray D. The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2025. Pp. xvi + 223. $25.00 cloth. Madoff provides a behind the scenes look at the US’s system of taxation, finding not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit. She argues that through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy can remove themselves from the tax system entirely.

LAW IN ACTION

He, Qiaoling. Greyscale Legality: The Diverse Landscape of Intellectual Property Law Enforcement in China. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2025. Pp. vi + 210. $99.00 cloth. This book analyzes how and why legal transplants perish or thrive. Qiaoling He examines the application of international intellectual property (IP) law across six industries in China with widely differing degrees of IP enforcement, including biomedicine, telecom equipment, and film. She argues that laws, as drafted, function on a greyscale of interpretive and operative ambiguity within the industries where they are applied. National settings may not always be supportive of IP law transplants in reducing such ambiguity, but certain industry-specific directives, such as product standardization, can compensate.

LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Liu, Qian. Leftover Women in China: Understanding Legal Consciousness through Intergenerational Relationships. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025. Pp. xi + 219. $34.95 paper. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups, this book examines how “leftover women”—Chinese women who prefer to remain single, those who are waiting for the right husband, and queer women—deal with parental and social pressure, as well as the denial of their right to have children outside of heterosexual marriage. Exploring the distinctive patterns of parent-child interactions in Chinese families, Liu invites readers to understand leftover women’s observance, evasion, and manipulation of the law in the context of intergenerational relationships and obligations.

REGULATION OF THE BODY

Sarat, Austin and Susanna Lee, eds. Regulating the Body: Autonomy, Control, and the Broken Promise of Equality in American Law. New York: NYU Press, 2025. Pp. v + 242. $30.00 paper. Contributors to Sarat and Lee’s volume examine the practices and discourses used to regulate the body, concentrating on US scenarios where ethical and legal inconsistencies abound. Regulations considered include those focused on the sale of gametes, parental rights over children’s genetic information, debates about masking, discourse regarding vaccines and abortion, anti-transgender legislation, and the control of inmates’ bodies on death row. They argue that these regulations are situated within a cultural and political environment that values regulation and punishment over long-standing constitutional protections.

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Gökarıksel, Saygun. Moral Autopsy: Truths, Secrets, and the Judicial Afterlives of Communist Secret Service Archives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Pp. xxix + 309. $105.00 cloth. When communism was proclaimed dead in Eastern Europe around 1989, archives of communist secret services became the site of judicial and moral examination of lives, suspicions of treason or ‘collaboration’ with the criminalized communist regime, and contending notions of democracy, truth, and justice. Through close study of court trials, biographies, media, films, and plays concerning judges, academics, journalists, and artists who were accused of being communist spies in Poland, Gökarıksel’s critical ethnography develops the notion of moral autopsy to interrogate the fundamental problems underlying global transitional justice.