CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
Durán, Robert J. and Oralia Loza. Justice Required: Police Shootings as Legalized Violence. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2025. Pp. xi + 356. $35.00 paper. Durán and Loza provide a comprehensive analysis of all police shootings in Denver, Colorado, over nearly forty years, highlighting persistent patterns of racial and ethnic inequality. They focus on institutional and political dynamics that thwart efforts to hold police officers accountable after controversial incidents. They conclude that while police shootings are typically treated as a criminal justice issue, they should be understood as a public health problem.
Garland, David. Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025. Pp. vi + 219. $33.00 cloth. Garland argues that, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence and social problems at levels unknown in other affluent nations, with aggressive policing and punishment as the default response. He finds nothing paradoxical in America’s reliance on coercive state controls, as he sees the nation’s liberalism as largely an economic liberalism devoted to free markets and corporate power rather than to individual dignity and flourishing. He concludes that fear of violent crime and distrust of others ensure public support for this coercive Leviathan; racism enables indifference to its harms.
Gonzalez, Shannon Malone. The Secrets of Silence: The Everyday Policing of Black Women and Their Stories about Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025. Pp. iv + 299. $32.00 cloth. Drawing on life-history interviews with black women about their encounters with police, Malone Gonzalez examines the pervasive and often invisible forms of everyday policing that render black women’s stories missing from official data, headlines, and community conversations in the US. Drawing on abolition feminism and black knowledge traditions, she envisions storytelling—and listening—as a way to reimagine, remember, and reconnect in solidarity and worldbuilding.
Page, Joshua and Joe Soss. Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Pp. iv + 458. $26.00 paper. Page and Soss argue that since the 1980s, US policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, including original ethnographic research, they examine these dimensions of criminal legal governance and find that practices that criminalize, police, and punish have been retrofitted to siphon resources from subordinated groups, subsidize governments, and generate corporate profits.
Peppers, Todd C., Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welet Atwell, eds. The Slow Death of the Death Penalty: Toward a Postmortem. New York: NYU Press, 2025. Pp. viii + 320. $35.00 paper. Contributors to Peppers, Almallen, and Atwell’s volume pinpoint factors that have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment in the US, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors. Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime.
Shjarback, John. Chasing Change in Camden: Police Reform in One of America’s Most Violent Cities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2025. Pp. xv + 164. $28.95 paper. In the 1990s and 2000s, Camden, New Jersey was seen as one of America’s most dangerous cities. In 2013, the Camden Police Department was dissolved, and the Camden County Police Department was created in its place, refocusing priorities and officer performance standards to engage with the community and build trust. The change was significant, with notable drops in violent crime and murder, but concerns about aggressive practices continued. In this volume Shjarback examines the reformation of Camden’s police department and questions whether it can serve as a model for other cities.
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.
