New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's decision to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, set off a chain of events that culminated in the only prosecution undertaken in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the decades since Garrison captured headlines with this high-profile legal spectacle, historians, conspiracy advocates, and Hollywood directors alike have fixated on how a New Orleans–based assassination conspiracy might have worked. Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prose...
Oct 04, 2021•41 min•Ep. 24
The Malleability of Memory is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Elizabeth Loftus, a world-renowned expert on human memory and Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science; Criminology, Law, and Society; Cognitive Science and Law at UC Irvine. This extensive conversation covers her ground-breaking work on the misinformation effect, false memories and her battles with “repressed memory” advocates, the introduction of expert memory testimony into legal proceedin...
Sep 28, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 57
With a focus on the court diversion of disabled people, Disability, Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion (Routledge 2020) undertakes a theoretical and empirical examination of how law is complicit in debilitating disabled people. In our post-institutionalisation era, diversion of disabled people from the court process is often assumed to be humane, therapeutic and socially just. However, in this work, Dr. Linda Steele draws on Foucauldian theory of biopolitics, critical legal ...
Sep 28, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 139
There's a lot of hype about robots; some of it is scary and some of it utopian. In this accessible book, two robotics experts reveal the truth about what robots can and can't do, how they work, and what we can reasonably expect their future capabilities to be. It will not only make you think differently about the capabilities of robots; it will make you think differently about the capabilities of humans. Ruth Aylett and Patricia Vargas discuss the history of our fascination with robots—from chat...
Sep 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 72
Robinson Woodward-Burns is the author of Hidden Laws: How the State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics , published by Yale University Press in 2021. Hidden Laws explores the relationship between both state and national constitutional development, debates, and reform. A sprawling study of American constitutional history, Woodward-Burns’s book shows how the federal government often deferred to state constitutional reform as a mechanism for dealing with national constitutional controversies....
Sep 21, 2021•51 min•Ep. 1071
As governments and corporations mine our “entrenched culture of sharing” to invade privacy (down to Target creating an algorithm to figure out which shoppers are in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy) what happens to democracy? Can democracy survive with no (or very little privacy)? What if the citizenry cares little about privacy and or is unwilling to protect it? If surveillance is here to stay what are the prospects for individual autonomy? citizenship? democratic discussion and deliberation? Lif...
Sep 20, 2021•47 min•Ep. 550
As governments and corporations mine our “entrenched culture of sharing” to invade privacy (down to Target creating an algorithm to figure out which shoppers are in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy) what happens to democracy? Can democracy survive with no (or very little privacy)? What if the citizenry cares little about privacy and or is unwilling to protect it? If surveillance is here to stay what are the prospects for individual autonomy? citizenship? democratic discussion and deliberation? Lif...
Sep 20, 2021•47 min•Ep. 550
Two plays about the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India. On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end? How far does the law’s shadow fall? How clear is the line...
Sep 20, 2021•47 min•Ep. 130
"El Chapo. The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord" (Atria Books, 2021) is a stunning investigation of the life and legend of Mexican kingpin Joaquín Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, building on Noah Hurowitz’s revelatory coverage for Rolling Stone of El Chapo’s federal drug-trafficking trial. This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with ...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 130
Gene Slater's book Free to Discriminate: How the Nation's Realtors Created Housing Segregation and the Conservative Vision of American Freedom (Hayday Books, 2021) uncovers realtors' definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservative thought. Gene Slater follows this story from inside the realtor profession, drawing on many industry documents that have remained unexamined until now. His book traces the increasingly aggressive ways realtors justified their practices, how they ...
Sep 14, 2021•38 min•Ep. 117
Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb is the author of Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy , published by Lexington Books in 2021. Race Unequals takes a look at the complex relationship between enslavers and overseers in order to explore the ways in which the “white South” was not a monolithic identity, but one in which white male identity was constantly created, contested, and compromised over. By examining contracts, publi...
Sep 14, 2021•30 min•Ep. 1070
In Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence (Firenze UP, 2021), Dr Miller analyses empirical findings, methodologies and conclusions of the three main national inquiries (Irish, US, Australian) into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Church responses. Contrasts are drawn with overall media reporting of the problem, such as when abuse peaked, and current safe-guarding and its effectiveness in curbing child sexual abuse. Topics discussed include ch...
Sep 13, 2021•56 min•Ep. 67
Public disenchantment with and distrust of American government is at an all-time high and who can blame them? In the face of widespread challenges--everything from record levels of personal and national debt and the sky high cost of education, to gun violence, racial discrimination, an immigration crisis, overpriced pharmaceuticals, and much more--the government seems paralyzed and unable to act, the most recent example being Covid-19. It's the deadliest pandemic in over a century. In addition t...
Sep 13, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 122
What is image-based abuse? Why has it been on the rise in Asia, especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic? What has been done to tackle the issue? Raquel Carvalho , Asia Correspondent for the South China Morning Post, shares the story of how a group of journalists across some Asian newsrooms collaborated in a months-long investigation and uncover the stories inside the online groups spreading stolen sexual images of women and children, how the victims are struggling to have such content removed from...
Sep 10, 2021•28 min
What does citizenship—an institution that has historically linked identity to place—mean in an age of globalization? This is the question that Atossa Araxia Abrahamian investigates in her planet-sprawling book The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015). One way Abrahamian answers that question is by examining elites shopping for passports in a global marketplace. But the question also pulls her deep into a grim passports-in-bulk scheme that offloaded state...
Sep 10, 2021•52 min•Ep. 1067
Gender, and regulations of and discourses on it, have historically been a cornerstone of the conservative Christian belief system. The stance of the Catholic Church on feminism, for instance, has often been criticized for being reductive and exclusionary. As Christianity has exerted a profound influence on the government and principles of the United States from the time of its founding, in this modern age, it is natural to examine the extent of its influence on LGBTQ-related, and particularly tr...
Sep 08, 2021•14 min•Ep. 51
In Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), Emma Marris wrestles with big ethical questions facing the conservation field. Emma takes us through several experiences that informed the book, exposing us to relevant on-the-ground decisions impacting the life or death of animals. When the interests of individual animals conflict with the goals of biodiversity preservation, is it okay to kill? Are any animals truly wild now that humans have directly al...
Sep 08, 2021•53 min•Ep. 295
Few revolutions in economics have been as under-covered in general literature as the emergence and development of competition theory and policymaking. Political threats to break up the tech giants or restrain Russian gas pipelines make the headlines while academic lawyers churn out textbooks on 130 years of precedent and practicing lawyers test its limits. What has been missing is an up-to-date, general legislative and intellectual history of how and why politicians, lawyers, and economists in c...
Sep 07, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 78
Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021) critically analyses the role that obligations play in law and social ordering. As rights have become preeminent feature in modern societies, the work that obligations do has faded into the background. However, in his latest book, Professor Scott Veitch challenges the normative assumptions that shape law and social practices, and shows how obligations and practices of obedience are core to sustaining the inequalities faced by members of the g...
Sep 07, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 138
Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that an enormous proportion of medical care worldwide is provided under the auspices of religious organizations, there has been a sustained and systematic campaign to drive out those with religious worldviews from the field of bioethics and indeed, from medicine itself. Obviously, this constitutes blatant discrimination against patients, the unborn, the elderly and the otherwise vulnerable and their families and faith-oriented medical providers and religi...
Sep 06, 2021•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 121
Improving Human Rights is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Emilie Hafner-Burton, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of International Justice and Human Rights at UC San Diego and co-director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the School. This extensive conversation covers topics such international law, when and why international laws work and don’t work, the international human rights system and concrete measures that could be...
Sep 03, 2021•1 hr 55 min•Ep. 40
Over the past decade, Poland and Hungary have become laboratories for a new kind of government: proto-authoritarian regimes that still have regular elections, vibrant oppositions and are externally constrained by EU law and potential loss of fiscal transfers. Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister since 2010, especially has generated a comprehensive academic literature attempting to understand the special nature of his regime. Two earlier podcasts with András Körösényi and Gábor Scheiring about ...
Sep 03, 2021•40 min•Ep. 77
Herbert “Bert” Kritzer, the Marvin J. Sonosky Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, has a new book that explores the process for reform of judicial selection across the fifty states. This is a fascinating examination of the different approaches that state legislatures, governors, partisans, and citizens have pursued in reforming the process, within each state, of judicial selection at all levels. With a brief historical overview of how this process was initial...
Sep 02, 2021•47 min•Ep. 541
There are two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible? The Feminist and the Sex Offend...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 115
Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted suicide) has expanded rapidly in the United States, and is now legally available to one in five Americans. This growing social and political movement heralds the possibility of a new era of choice in dying. Yet very little is publicly known about how medical aid-in-dying laws affect ordinary citizens once they are put into practice. Sociological studies of new health policies have repeatedly demonstrated that the realities of...
Aug 31, 2021•52 min•Ep. 134
Why is there such a deep partisan division within the United States regarding how health care should be organized and financed and how can we encourage politicians to band together again for the good of everyone? For decades, Democratic and Republican political leaders have disagreed about the fundamental goals of American health policy. The modern-day consequences of this disagreement, particularly in the Republicans' campaign to erode the coverage and equity gains of the Affordable Care Act, c...
Aug 30, 2021•39 min•Ep. 113
Catholic Greg Bourke's profoundly moving memoir about growing up gay and overcoming discrimination in the battle for same-sex marriage in the US. In this compelling and deeply affecting memoir, Greg Bourke recounts growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and living as a gay Catholic. Gay, Catholic, and American: My Legal Battle for Marriage Equality and Inclusion (U Notre Dame Press, 2021) describes Bourke's early struggles for acceptance as an out gay man living in the South during the 1980s and '9...
Aug 27, 2021•55 min•Ep. 22
Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security per...
Aug 25, 2021•57 min•Ep. 75
“Religious liberty” is a phrase that we often hear, particularly in news stories revolving around Supreme Court decisions. But what is religious liberty and why is it often referred to as “the first liberty?” These are among the questions addressed in Kenneth Starr’s 2021 book, Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty (Encounter, 2021) Although Judge Starr possesses impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is intended for general readers. It is an informative...
Aug 23, 2021•57 min•Ep. 120
When we talk about people crossing borders, policy makers, advocates, journalists, and academics often distinguish between “refugees” and “migrants.” Is this a useful legal fiction? Shorthand for an important distinction? Dr. Rebecca Hamlin argues that employing this binary limits protection for vulnerable people who are not protected by the rarified category of “refugee.” In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford UP, 2021), Dr. Hamlin confronts the binary -- and the ef...
Aug 23, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 546
