CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND HISTORY

Bilder, Mary Sarah. Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 344. $29.50, cloth.

This biography of Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor looks to the 1780s—the age of the US Constitution—to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. This path-breaking female educator delivered a lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such public female lecturer, her performance likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution. In recovering Harriot’s pioneering life, Bilder concludes that America’s framing moment did not belong solely to white men and offers a transatlantic history of women who believed in education as a political right.

Goldstein, Jared A. Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 351. $34.95 paper.

Goldstein argues that US movements devoted to defending the power of dominant racial, ethnic, and religious groups deploy the rhetoric of constitutional devotion to express their national visions and justify their violence. Goldstein describes this as constitutional nationalism, an ideology that defines being an American as standing with, and by, the Constitution. One prominent example is the Ku Klux Klan’s self-declared mission to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” which served to justify its campaign of violence in the 1860s and 1870s to prevent Black people from exercising the right to vote.

Krygier, Martin, Adam, Czarnota, and Wojciech, Sadurski, eds. Anti-Constitutional Populism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 549. $34.99 paper.

Around the world, populist parties have sprung up in formerly and formally liberal-democratic polities, challenging their existing political parties and leaders and frequently overwhelming them. Contributors to Krygier, Czarnota, and Sadurski’s volume explore the character of these contemporary populisms and their relationships to constitutional democracy from a global perspective. Using comparative and multidisciplinary techniques, the book considers the specifics and similarities of populisms, raises general questions about their nature and potential futures, and seeks to present a nuanced understanding of populism as a diverse, global phenomenon.

Tushnet, Mark V. The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xxxiv + 1238. $260.00 cloth.

In this comprehensive study of the US Supreme Court from 1930 to 1941—when Charles Evans Hughes was chief justice—Tushnet argues that nearly all justices, even the most conservative, accepted the broad premises of a Progressive theory of government and the Constitution. Examining the court’s work in constitutional law, administrative law, the law of justiciability, civil rights and civil liberties, and statutory interpretation, he finds that, while constitutional and public law was discernibly different by 1941 from what it had been in 1930, there was no sharp or instantaneous constitutional revolution in 1937, as is frequently argued.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL CONTROL

Braithwaite, John. Macrocriminology and Freedom. Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, 2022. Pp. xxi + 791. $90.00 cloth (also available for free download at https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/).

Braithwaite seeks to refine some of criminology’s central theories and sharpen their relevance to all varieties of freedom. He proposes that the purpose of crime control should be to build freedom, temper power, lift people from poverty, and reduce all forms of domination. These purposes are based on the principle that freedom requires a more just normative order; it requires the cascading of peace by social movements for non-violence and non-domination.

DeJean, Joan. Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. viii + 437. $18.99 paper.

DeJean tells the story of 132 women, falsely accused of sex crimes, exiled from France to the US Mississippi Valley in 1719. She finds that the sixty-two women who survived carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property; many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling in what is today Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.

Fritsch, Kelly, Jeffrey, Monaghan, and Emily, van der Meulen, eds. Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. vi + 351. $89.95 cloth.

Contributors to Fritsch, Monaghan, and van der Meulen’s volume explore disability in the historical and contemporary Canadian criminal justice system and find that ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous—even deadly—for disabled people. They examine disability in contexts that include policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and other carceral spaces, and alternatives to confinement.

Hagedorn, John M. Gangs on Trial: Challenging Stereotypes and Demonization in the Courts. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 224. $34.95 paper.

Hagedorn uses stories from seventy-three US gang-related cases on which he consulted to argue that dehumanizing stereotypes are a prosecutor’s best friend. He argues that, rather than consider the social context of a crime or the real biography of the defendant, the prosecutor convinces the court that violence is part of the defendant’s nature and that the circumstances are less important or even irrelevant. He concludes that this process of dehumanization is the psychological foundation of mass incarceration.

Haney, Lynne. Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022. Pp. ii + 358. $29.95 paper.

Drawing on observations of twelve hundred child support cases and interviews with 145 indebted fathers in New York, California, and Florida, Haney examines the practices of child support adjudication and enforcement alongside the lived realities of fathers trapped in those systems. Through moving accounts of men struggling to be fathers from behind prison walls and under the weight of support debt, she finds that criminalization of child support undermines the most essential of familial relationships. She concludes that these state systems can end up producing exactly the kind of parent they fear and loathe: bitter, unreliable, and cyclical fathers.

Hlavka, Heather R., and Sameena, Mulla. Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. iv + 298. $30.00 paper.

Hlavka and Mulla draw on observations of over 680 court appearances in felony sexual assault matters in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, as well as interviews with judges, attorneys, forensic scientists, jurors, sexual assault nurse examiners, and victim advocates. They find that forensic science helps to propagate public misunderstandings of sexual violence by bestowing an aura of authority to race and gender stereotypes and inequalities. They conclude that courts drag defendants, victims, and their friends and family through a confusing and protracted public spectacle, while “experts” shape the story that emerges for the judge and jury.

Neuschatz, Jeffrey S., and Jonathan, M. Golding. Jailhouse Informants: Psychological and Legal Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. ii + 195. $30.00 paper.

Neuschatz and Golding offer a broad overview of the history and legal and psychological issues surrounding the testimony of jailhouse informants in the United States. They draw on psychological research to address how informants are used, the number of convictions that have ultimately been overturned on other evidence, how such informants are perceived in the courtroom, and by what means jurors might be informed about the risks of this type of testimony.

Oleson, James C., and Ronald, Kramer. Contesting Crime Science: Our Misplaced Faith in Crime Prevention Technology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. Pp. xi + 264. $29.95 paper.

Oleson and Kramer interrogate the promises of crime science and target a misplaced faith in technology as the solution to criminality. Rather than holding the technological keys to crime’s resolution, they find that crime sciences inscribe criminality on particular bodies and constitute a primary resource for the conceptualization of crime that many societies take for granted. They conclude that, while crime science may strive to reduce crime, in doing so it reproduces power asymmetries, creates profit motives, undermines important legal concepts, instantiates questionable practices, and opens new vistas of deviant activity.

Schept, Judah. Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. ii + 320. $32.00 paper.

More than 350 prisons have been built in the United States since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth; Central Appalachia is one such region—there are eight prisons in Eastern Kentucky alone. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept links prison growth to other sites in the Central Appalachian landscape—coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators. He concludes that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Armoudian, Maria. Lawyers beyond Borders: Advancing International Human Rights through Local Laws and Courts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 247. $24.95 paper.

Armoudian tells the story of a small cadre of civil rights lawyers who have sought to use the US legal system in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. It is about how, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, a small group of lawyers and survivors began building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

JUDICIAL POWER AND DECISION MAKING

Abraham, Kenneth S., and Edward White, G.. Tort Law and the Construction of Change: Studies in the Inevitability of History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. x + 288. $55.00 cloth.

Abraham and White argue that two versions of history—one grounded in the application of previous legal rules and the other responsive to larger societal changes—must be considered in tandem to grasp fully how US civil law has evolved over the past two hundred years. They analyze five areas of tort law and find that judges perform a complicated legal dance to cloak their decisions to make at times radical changes in tort law in response to social transformations, preserving at least the appearance of doctrinal continuity.

Cheema, Moeen. Courting Constitutionalism: The Politics of Public Law and Judicial Review in Pakistan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xxvii + 259. $110.00 cloth.

Cheema situates the judicial review jurisprudence of the superior courts in Pakistan in the context of historical developments in constitutional politics, the evolution of state structures, and broader social transformations. He finds that the bedrock of judicial review has remained in administrative law; it is through the consistent development of the “Writ jurisdiction” and the judicial review of administrative action that Pakistan’s superior courts have progressively carved out an expansive institutional role and aggrandized themselves to the status of the regulator of the state.

LAW AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Roy, Tirthankar, and Anand V., Swamy. Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy: India 1947 and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 298. $45.00 cloth.

Roy and Swamy argue that legal evolution in independent India has been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity—both domestic and international—can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing faction of society, including the poor. Weaving the story of India’s heralded economic transformation with its social and political history, they conclude that inadequate legal infrastructure has been a key impediment to the country’s economic growth.

LAW AND EMOTION

Roach, Anleu, Sharyn, , and Kathy, Mack. Judging and Emotion: A Socio-Legal Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xiii + 213. $112.00 cloth.

Drawing on research with Australian judicial officers, Roach Anleu and Mack investigate how judicial officers understand, experience, display, manage, and deploy emotions in their everyday work, and they challenge the conventional assumption that emotion is inherently unpredictable, stressful, or inconsistent with impartiality. They articulate a broader conception of emotion as a social practice emerging from interaction and argue that judicial officers undertake emotion work and use emotion as a resource to achieve impartiality.

LAW AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Darian-Smith, Eve. Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 212. $22.00 paper.

Darian-Smith looks deeply into catastrophic wildfires in Australia, Brazil, and the United States and calls for acknowledgment of the global systems of inequality that undergird them, connecting the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment. She argues that the wildfires are closely linked through capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and resource extraction.

LAW AND FOOD

Canfield, Matthew C. Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. xi + 264. $26.00 paper.

While agro-industrial production is promoted as the solution to food insecurity, growing global “food sovereignty” movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems. Canfield accompanies activists based in the US Pacific Northwest as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. He finds that, in contrast to social movements that frame their claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists articulate themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance.

LAW AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Tourkochoriti, Ioanna. Freedom of Expression: The Revolutionary Roots of American and French Legal Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 296. $110.00 cloth.

This comparative study of France and the United States argues that the limits of freedom of expression are informed by different revolutionary experiences and constitutional and political arrangements. Tourkochoriti argues that the different ways in which freedom of expression is balanced against other values in France and the United States can be understood in reference to the role of government and the understanding of republicanism and liberty, affecting the historical, social, and philosophical contexts in which jurists operate.

LAW AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Mann, Larisa Kingston. Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xi + 228. $29.95 paper.

In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Mann identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. In street dances, recording sessions, and global genres such as the “riddim,” notions of originality include reliance on shared knowledge and authorship as an interactive practice. Music makers organize performance and commerce in ways that defy state ordinances and intellectual property law and provide poor Jamaicans with avenues for self-expression and self-definition that are closed off to them in the wider society.

Salter, Brent S. Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. x + 266. $110.00 cloth.

Drawing on archival discoveries from the past two centuries, Salter analyzes how copyright has been negotiated in US theater, mapping the relations among the various players from the ground up. He finds that at the center of these negotiations are mediating businesses with extraordinary power that rapidly evolved from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries: agents, publishers, producers, labor associations, administrators, accountants, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and film studio executives. And as these mediators asserted authority over creativity, creators organized to respond—through collective minimum contracts, informal guild expectations, and professional norms—to protect their presumed rights as authors.

LAW AND LABOR

Kocher, Eva. Digital Work Platforms at the Interface of Labour Law: Regulating Market Organisers. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. Pp. xxi + 261. $115.00 cloth.

Kocher presents a design for labor rights to effectively protect digital platform workers, organize accountability on digital work platforms, and guarantee workers’ collective representation and action. She examines the organizational ideas that permeate labor law’s categories as well as its policy approaches in a variety of jurisdictions and concludes that these ideas reveal a lack of fit between labor law’s traditional concepts and digital platform work: digital work platforms rarely behave like hierarchical organizations; instead, they more often function as market organizers.

LAW AND THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

Currah, Paisley. Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 229. $28.00 cloth.

Every government agency in the United States—from Homeland Security to State Departments of Motor Vehicles—has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification; as a result, many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Providing examples from different states, government agencies, and court cases, Currah explains how transgender people struggle to navigate this confusing and contradictory web of legal rules, definitions, and classifications and asks what the regulation of transgender identity can tell us about society’s approach to sex and gender writ large.

LAW AND LITERATURE

Goodrich, Peter, Daniela, Gandorfer, and Cecilia, Gebruers, eds. Research Handbook on Law and Literature. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2022. Pp. xiv + 614. $330.00 cloth.

Rethinking law by means of literary concepts, the contributors to Goodrich, Gandorfer, and Gebruers’s handbook seek to destabilize the traditional hierarchy that places law before literature and to expose the literary nature of the legal. Working with diverse methods and areas of inquiry, including estrangement, colonial entanglements, blockchain narratives, transing and transgression of many kinds, matterphor, aesthetics, and epistemology, they offer an application of literary approaches to the reading of law and insights on materialist accounts of law.

LAW AND POPULAR CULTURE

Sharp, Cassandra. Hashtag Jurisprudence: Terror and Legality on Twitter. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2022. Pp. xi + 182. $115.00 cloth.

Sharp analyzes the social media responses to global terror events to interpret the ways in which individuals view their place in the world and their relation to law and justice. She constructs a notion of “hashtag jurisprudence” and offers a theory of law that combines narratives, the experience of terror, and the expression of emotion through social media engagement.

LAW AND THE PRESS

Bricker, Andrew Benjamin. Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii + 326. $90.00 cloth.

Bricker argues that English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long eighteenth century. Following the lapse of prepublication licensing in 1695, the authorities quickly turned to the courts and newly repurposed libel laws in an attempt to regulate the press. In response, satirists and their booksellers devised a range of evasions; the characterizations that came to typify eighteenth-century English satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were new legal pressures; rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature-acoustic and new visual forms.

LAW AND RACE

Bay, Mia. Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021. Pp. ii + 391. $35.00 cloth.

From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought to move freely around the United States. Curious as to why so many cases contesting the doctrine of “separate but equal” involved trains and buses, Bay went back to the sources to explore when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and to portray what it was like to live with them. She rescues forgotten stories of undaunted passengers who made it back home despite being insulted, stranded, rerouted, or ignored, enhancing the understanding of Black resistance and documenting a sustained fight that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement.

Capers, Bennett, Carbado, Devon W., Lenhardt, R. A., and Onwuachi-Willig, Angela, eds. Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and the Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xxix + 694. $39.99 paper.

Contributors to Capers and colleague’s volume rewrite US Supreme Court opinions that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, arguing that it is possible to be a judge and a critical race theorist. Specific issues covered in these cases include the death penalty, employment, voting, policing, education, the environment, justice, housing, immigration, sexual orientation, segregation, and mass incarceration. While some rewritten cases originally focused on race, many of the rewritten opinions are used to incorporate racial justice principles in novel ways.

LAW AND RELIGION

McCrary, Charles. Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. iii + 300. $30.00 paper.

McCrary provides an account of how “sincerely held religious belief” became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion in the United States. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants to argue that sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and does not entitle a person to receive protections from the state.

LAW AND SLAVERY

Pérez, Morales, Edgardo. Unraveling Abolition: Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 242. $110.00 cloth.

Pérez Morales tells the story of slaves, former slaves, magistrates, and legal workers who fought for emancipation in Colombia from 1781 to 1830. Through the life stories of enslaved litigants and defendants, he illuminates the rise of antislavery culture and how this tradition of legal tinkering and struggle shaped claims to equal citizenship during the anti-Spanish revolutions of the early 1800s. Legal activists were radically committed to the idea that independence from Spain would be incomplete without emancipation for all slaves.

LAW AND TAXATION

Zelenak, Lawrence, and Ajay, Mehrotra, eds. A Half-Century with the Internal Revenue Code: The Memoirs of Stanley S. Surrey. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2022. Pp. lvii + 360. $73.00 paper.

Stanley S. Surrey was the most prominent mid-twentieth-century US tax law academic and, aside from politicians, was the federal government official with the greatest influence on tax policy in that period. Surrey’s influence on the federal tax system was deep and pervasive and continues today; perhaps his most enduring accomplishment was the development of tax expenditure analysis, which has played a central role since the 1970s in tax policy discussions. At his death in 1984, Surrey had written polished drafts of the majority of his planned professional memoirs; Zelenak and Mehrotra have edited these memoirs for publication.

LAW AND THE US REGULATORY STATE

Novak, William J. New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. viii + 373. $45.00 cloth.

Arguing against the notion that the United States was a weak state until the Roosevelt years, Novak argues that the activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before. He finds that, in the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, a series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. He concludes that the New Deal was a continuation of these prior developments rather than a break.

LAW AND WOMEN

Cramer, Renee Ann. Birthing a Movement: Midwives, Law, and the Politics of Reproductive Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 274. $30.00 paper.

Cramer draws on over a decade of ethnographic and archival research to examine the interactions of law, politics, and activism surrounding midwifery care. Currently, certified professional midwives (CPMs) are legal and regulated in thirty-two US states, illegal in eight, and unregulated, but nominally legal, in ten. By studying states where CPMs have differing legal statuses, she makes the case that midwives and their clients engage in various forms of mobilization—at times, simultaneous and, at times, inconsistent—to facilitate access to care, autonomy in childbirth, and the articulation of women’s authority in reproduction.

Michelson, Ethan. Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii + 544. $155.00 cloth (also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core).

Michelson uses “big data” computational techniques to scrutinize about 150,000 cases from 2009 to 2016 from all 252 basic-level courts in two Chinese provinces (Henan and Zhejiang). He finds that since the mid-2000s women have borne the brunt of a dramatic intensification of a decades-long practice of denying divorce requests. He takes the reader upstream to the institutional sources of China’s clampdown on divorce and downstream to its devastating and highly gendered human toll, concluding that judges in an overburdened court system clear their oppressive dockets at the expense of women’s lawful rights and interests.

LAW AND THE MILITARY

Kyle, Brett J., and Andrew G. Reiter. Military Courts, Civil-Military Relations, and the Legal Battle for Democracy: The Politics of Military Justice. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. viii + 243. $160.00 cloth.

Drawing on a newly created dataset of 120 countries over more than two centuries, Kyle and Reiter present a comprehensive picture of the evolution of military justice across states and over time. Combined with qualitative historical case studies of Colombia, Portugal, Indonesia, Fiji, Brazil, Pakistan, and the United States, they seek to present a new framework for understanding how civilian actors are able to gain or lose legal control of the armed forces.

LEGAL PROFESSION

Cummings, Scott L., Fabio, de Sa e Silva, and Louise G., Trubek. Global Pro Bono: Causes, Context, and Contestation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xi + 729. $110.00 cloth.

Contributors to Cummings, de Sa e Silva, and Trubek’s volume explore the expanding geographical and political reach of pro bono, its contribution to bringing more justice to those on the margins, and its complex and contested meaning in different parts of the world. They focus empirically on a range of factors shaping pro bono’s development within and across over twenty countries and envision the consequences of pro bono’s global development, including who does pro bono, who benefits from pro bono, and how pro bono’s development has affected access to justice policies.

McEvoy, Kieran, Louise, Mallinder, and Anna, Bryson. Lawyers in Conflict and Transition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii + 413. $110.00 cloth.

Drawing on over 130 interviews from Cambodia, Chile, Israel, Palestine, South Africa, and Tunisia, McEvoy, Mallinder, and Bryson explore the extent to which theoretical understandings within law and society research on the motivations, strategies, tactics, and experiences of lawyers within democratic states apply to these more challenging environments. They explore lawyers in transitional conflict and their motivations, agency, creativity, and struggles to reimagine and reshape legal values, institutions, and the rule of law.

Pavone, Tommaso. The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 364. $125.00 cloth.

Drawing on hundreds of semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners, evidence from courts’ and lawyers’ archives, newspaper records, and geospatial mapping, Pavone argues that, in the shadows, Europe’s political development unfolded as a struggle between judges who resisted European law and lawyers who pushed them to embrace change. These “Euro-lawyers” sought clients willing to break state laws conflicting with European law, lobbied national judges to uphold European rules, and propelled them to submit noncompliance cases to the European Union’s supreme court by ghostwriting their referrals, thus mobilizing clients and courts against their own governments.

REGULATION

Shen, Shiran Victoria. The Political Regulation Wave: A Case of How Local Incentives Systematically Shape Air Quality in China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xx + 141. $99.99 cloth (also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core).

Shen examines and compares the control of different air pollutants in China—an autocracy—and, to a lesser extent, Mexico—a democracy. She finds that local leaders and politicians are incentivized to cater to the policy preferences of their superiors or constituents, respectively, giving rise to varying levels of regulatory stringency during the leaders’ tenures. She concludes that, when ambiguity dilutes regulatory effectiveness, having the right incentives and enhanced monitoring is insufficient for successful policy implementation.

SELF-REPRESENTATION IN LEGAL SYSTEMS

Goldschmidt, Jona. Self-Representation: Law, Ethics, and Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022. Pp. ix + 445. $135.00 cloth.

This book collects and analyzes the law, ethics opinions, and empirical studies about a wide range of issues surrounding self-represented litigants (SRLs) in the US justice system, including how much, if any, assistance should be provided by a judge, what duties should lawyers interacting with SRLs provide, and many other concerns. Drawing on empirical studies of both civil litigation and criminal defense, Goldschmidt argues that cases concerning SRLs cannot be fairly heard without a mandatory judicial duty of reasonable assistance.