Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Dr. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expans...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 52
Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz's book The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy (Cambridge UP, 2021) explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network ...
Nov 30, 2022•49 min•Ep. 124
Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell UP, 2022) tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian geno...
Nov 25, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 171
What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should Th...
Nov 25, 2022•52 min•Ep. 40
While it might ordinarily be assumed that judges who sit on constitutional courts will be local citizens, in the islands of the Pacific, more than three-quarters of judges are foreign. This is book about that unique phenomenon, but a phenomenon that has global implications. Foreign Judges in the Pacific (Hart, 2021) is a comprehensive study which brings together original empirical research, together with legal analysis and constitutional theory, and traces the impact and influence of foreign jud...
Nov 25, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 173
Frans Camphuijsen explored records from the law courts of York, Paris, and Utrecht and used them as a base for Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York, and Paris (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position b...
Nov 23, 2022•51 min•Ep. 17
There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous...
Nov 22, 2022•37 min•Ep. 206
Should everyone have privacy in their personal lives? Can privacy exist in a public place? Is there a right to be left alone, even in the United States? The battle between an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know has been fought for centuries. You may be surprised to realize that the original framers were sensitive to the importance of privacy interests relating to sexuality and intimate life, but mostly just for the powerful and the privileged. The founders demanded priva...
Nov 22, 2022•51 min•Ep. 85
On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese govern...
Nov 22, 2022•54 min•Ep. 123
Experimentation on animals—particularly humans—is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. But the ideas and attitudes that encourage biological and medical scientists to experiment on living creatures date from the earliest expressions of Western thought. In Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) (Johns Hopkins UP), Anita Guerrini looks at the history of these practices and examines the philosophical and ethical arguments that justified...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 41
A few big companies are selling information about us to governments and companies. But beyond a general sense of unease, what do we need to know about this and what do we need to do about it? Professor Sarah Lamdan gives answers to those questions in her book Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolise our Information (Stanford UP, 2022). Listen to her conversations with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presen...
Nov 15, 2022•49 min•Ep. 39
The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catal...
Nov 15, 2022•41 min•Ep. 92
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the po...
Nov 15, 2022•36 min•Ep. 144
Is Marx relevant today, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe? Is Marx’s political theory compatible with individual rights? You will be surprised to learn that the answers are yes and yes. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) offers a theoretical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s new materialist understanding of justice, legality, and rights through the vantage point of his widely invoked but generally misunderstood...
Nov 14, 2022•58 min•Ep. 156
In March 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode, part two of a two-part series, Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination and the possible implications for Rohi...
Nov 11, 2022•21 min•Ep. 155
During the early twentieth century New York State, with its settlement houses, muckraking journalists, labor unions and national political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, was central to the political ferment of the Progressive Era. And in that time, the New York State Court of Appeals—the state’ highest court--made vitally important decisions on the constitutional legitimacy of laws relating to public health, personal liberty, privacy, the regulation of businesses, working hours for women, and ...
Nov 11, 2022•47 min•Ep. 203
Arvind Narrain is a lawyer and writer based in Bangalore. He is visiting faculty at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University. He is the co-editor of Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law and co-author of Breathing Life into the Constitution: Human Rights Lawyering in India and The Preamble: A Brief Introduction . He was a part of the team of lawyers that challenged Section 377 of the IPC right from the High Court in 2009 to the Supreme Court in 2018. In 1975, the Indira Gan...
Nov 10, 2022•55 min•Ep. 166
Which rules do we obey and which ones can we find a way around? What distinctions can be drawn between rules, models to be emulated and algorithms. Lorraine Daston has published widely on the history of science, probability, scientific objectivity and observation, and many other such matters, and she has now published Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton UP, 2022). Listen to her discussion with Owen Bennett Jones about rules. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...
Nov 08, 2022•35 min•Ep. 38
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration (Princeton UP...
Nov 07, 2022•48 min•Ep. 628
The political Left has long faced tension regarding its universalistic commitments and those to the nation it inhabits. The dilemma is captured succinctly in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that articulated leftist or progressive devotion to both man in the historic collective sense of human beings, as well as to the fellow members of a particular political community at the time of the French Revolution. That older tension persists at the same time that the left has increasingly...
Nov 07, 2022•47 min•Ep. 102
Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public s fear of the Black unknown and racist stereotypes to justify their exclusion. In Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 330
There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home u...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 168
Judicial debates on the regulation of religion in post-colonial India have been characterised by the inability of courts to identify religion as a governable phenomenon. Geetanjali Srikantan's book Identifying and Regulating Religion in India: Law, History and the Place of Worship (Cambridge UP, 2020) investigates the identification and regulation of religion through an intellectual history of law's creation of religion from the colonial to the post-colonial. Moving beyond conventional explanati...
Nov 03, 2022•23 min•Ep. 220
Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss’s life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 1277
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of the world. It’s the place where the world’s most corrupt individuals can park their money safely. How does that work? Where else does it happen and can anything be done about it? Owen Bennett Jones discusses the business of cleaning up dirty money with a journalist and author who has covered kleptocrats and their ill gotten gains for years, Oliver B...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 37
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of complicitors: business partners, employees, investors, news organizations, and others. And, whether we're aware of it or not, almost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. In Complicit: How We Enable the Unethic...
Nov 01, 2022•27 min•Ep. 50
We often find ourselves acting in concert with others, where what we do together goes beyond the causal contribution of any single participant. When a collection of individuals works together in a way that results in a wrongful harm, it’s intuitive to think that each of the participants should be held accountable. Yet this intuition needs to be squared with the fact that no single individual’s contribution was causally necessary for the wrongful harm to have occurred. Hence there’s a range of vi...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 298
Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the active support or acquiescence of government actors. The sharp increase in the number of victims of homicide, disappearances and torture over the past decade is unparalleled in the country's recent history. According to editors Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, the war on drugs launched in 2006 by President Felipe Calderón and the corrupting inf...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 1
Not long ago, same-sex couples had to jump through endless hoops to make their relationships even close to legal. Happily, those days are over. But here's the rub: many gay and lesbian couples, accustomed to living off-grid, are so thrilled to have the benefits of marriage that they jump into it without fully considering the consequences. In Before I Do: A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwise (New Press, 2016), leading gay rights attorney Elizabeth F. Schwartz spells out the range of pract...
Oct 27, 2022•44 min•Ep. 184
Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching. Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. ...
Oct 26, 2022•38 min•Ep. 42
