"Why do we think about some practices as work, and not others? Why do we classify certain capacities as economically valuable skills, and others as innate characteristics? What, moreover, is the role of law in shaping our answers to these questions?" These are just some of the queries explored by Dr. Zoe Adams's analysis of the legal construction, and regulation, of work, in her book The Legal Concept of Work (Oxford University Press, 2022). Spanning from the 14th century to the present day, the...
Feb 19, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 180
Professor Jonathan Herring makes an argument that suicidal people have a right to be protected from committing suicide, and that the state should be under a duty to take reasonable steps to protect them from killing themselves. In The Right to Be Protected from Committing Suicide (Hart, 2022) Herring takes a deep dive into ideas surrounding autonomy and capacity, to draw out the tensions between these concepts and the legal and ethical debates which provide support for non-interventionist argume...
Feb 19, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 180
Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investigation, sparked by the leak which revealed that cyber-intrusion and cyber-surveillance are happening with exponentially increasing frequency, across the globe. Pegasus, it turns out, is less a law enforcement tool than a weapon for hire and not only a threat to privacy but also to democracy, as the most notorious human-rights-violating governments an...
Feb 18, 2023•29 min•Ep. 65
The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Lisa Hajjar examines how hundreds of lawyers mobilized to challenge the illegal treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror and helped force an end to the US government's most odious policies. Told as a suspenseful, high-stakes story, The War in Court clearly outlines why challenges to the torture policy had to be waged on the legal terrain and why hundreds of lawyers joined the fight. ...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 43
In this episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Sarah Carter on her book Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces published by the University of British Columbia Press in 2020. She examines the reasons why Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were the first provinces to extend the vote to women in 1916 and why this same franchise was not extended to First Nations men and women as well as targeted minorities such as Chinese-Canadians until much later. Sarah Ca...
Feb 17, 2023•32 min•Ep. 22
When miners arrived in California seeking their fortune during the gold rush of the 1840s and early 1850s, they encountered a place with few existing legal systems. Recently acquired from Mexico, California was truly America's frontier, and when American miners arrived they did what Americans have always done: they held meetings. In We the Miners: Self-Government in the California Gold Rush (Harvard UP, 2022), Seton Hall law professor Andrea McDowell explains the development and working of miner...
Feb 17, 2023•49 min•Ep. 121
A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada–United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021), is the recipient of the AHA’s Albert Corey Prize in the history of Canadian–American relations. In A Line of Blood and Dirt, Benjamin Hoy shows how the US-Canadian border was built across Indigenous lands. He explores the experiences of various indigenous groups, European settlers, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants. Benjamin Hoy is an assistant professor of history at the Univers...
Feb 11, 2023•43 min•Ep. 1297
Abortion is an issue like no other. Our attitudes towards it and how we define when life begins determine the very words we use when discussing abortion. We don’t even agree about how many people are involved in the matter of abortion. Two people—the mother and the baby? Or only one—the mother? And here, even the word “mother” is avoided by many, who prefer “woman.” Or, in some quarters, “pregnant person.” Is it a “baby” or a “fetus?” Has abortion always had the tacit approval of most Americans ...
Feb 11, 2023•58 min•Ep. 163
Today’s book is: We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States . The “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship, and has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers —themselves currently or formerly undocumented—counter the Dreamer narrative by grapp...
Feb 09, 2023•54 min•Ep. 150
Today I talked to Max Bazerman about his book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop (Princeton UP, 2022). Remember Saturday Night Live’s satirical TV spot for Ivanka Trump’s perfume, Complicit? Talk about a timely topic. In what is Bazerman’s third book on ethics, the focus is on the people who surround an “evil” doer and enable or allow harmful behavior to occur. From the implosion of FTX under the funky leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried, to Elizabeth Holes at Theranos or Purdue ...
Feb 09, 2023•26 min•Ep. 126
Today I interview Erin Reed . Reed is an activist, public speaker, and writer across multiple platforms, including a Substack newsletter, all of which she gathers under the title “ Erin in the Morning .” Reed’s work centers on advocacy for the transgender community and the greater queer community. At the moment, she’s undertaken the momentous task of tracking the anti-trans legislation that’s being forwarded in state houses across the country and exposing its troubling, deceitful, and vicious na...
Feb 06, 2023•49 min•Ep. 48
What areas of our lives are governed by constitutional law? When asked about what constitutional law is, Americans tend to think of notable Supreme Court cases such as the abortion law case Roe v. Wade or the Civil Rights landmark of Brown v. Board of Education. But vast swaths of our lives are governed by, of all things, the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes....
Feb 03, 2023•1 hr 48 min•Ep. 179
Climate change and war have flung millions of people on the move, who often seek safe harbor in the very countries responsible for their displacement. But despite the lofty ideals and supposed simplicity of international refugee law, it turns out borders are not really the fixed lines on a map we imagine them to be. Guests: Deborah Anker is Clinical Professor of Law and Founder of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). Celeste Cantor-Stephens is a musician, inter...
Feb 02, 2023•24 min•Ep. 32
Bringing together two voices, practice and theory, in a collaboration that emerges from lived experience and structured reflection upon that experience, O'Mochain and Ueno show how entrenched discursive forces exert immense influence in Japanese society and how they might be most effectively challenged. With a psychosocial framework that draws insights from feminism, sociology, international studies, and political psychology, the authors pinpoint the motivations of the nativist right and reflect...
Feb 01, 2023•57 min•Ep. 111
In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls us to look to the sites of the greatest disadvantage, and take measures aimed at relieving them. This approach favors “race specific” policies for pursuing justice. However, that kind of rationale is increasingly vulnerable in a country that’s largely convinced that it has achieved a “po...
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 306
The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers ' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the reader through a nexus of the CCP's tyranny; from China's crackdown on its own citizens; through t...
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 178
In Break Point: Two Minnesota Athletes and the Road to Title IX (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Sheri Brenden examines how two teenage girls in Minnesota jump-started a revolution in high school athletics Peggy Brenden, a senior, played tennis. Toni St. Pierre, a junior, was a cross country runner and skier. All these two talented teenagers wanted was a chance to compete on their high school sports teams. But in Minnesota in 1972 the only way on the field with the boys ran through a feder...
Jan 25, 2023•47 min•Ep. 235
In the midst of the Second World War, Central and East European governments-in-exile struggled to make their voices heard as they reported back to the Allies and sought to reach mass Allied publics with eyewitness testimony of German atrocities committed in their respective homelands. The most striking case is that of Poland, whose wartime exile government served as the principal conduit for first-hand testimony (much of which was initially ignored, questioned, or suppressed by the major Allies)...
Jan 25, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 183
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter's health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions ...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 210
Historian Louis Hyman, professor and director of the Institute of Workplace Studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, talks about his book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and American Dream Became Temporary , with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. In this conversation, Hyman and Vinsel chat about how most mid-20th century secure jobs were possessed by white men, how temporary work began to rise after World War Two, and how all this led to the gig-...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 16
Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over five hundred years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region's Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religious laws of the Byzantine church; out of thirty-six surviving manuscripts of Byzantine canon law prod...
Jan 22, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 24
Wolfgang Muller, Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215- 1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the establishment of a coherent doctrine on sacramental marriage to the eve of the Reformation, late medieval church courts were used for marriage cases in a variety of ways. Ranging widely across Western Europe, including the Upper and Lower Rhine regions, England, Italy, Catalonia, and Castile, this study explores the stark discrepancies in practice between the North of Europe and th...
Jan 21, 2023•53 min•Ep. 23
In April 1988, after years of failed negotiations over the status of the Northwest Passage, Brian Mulroney gave Ronald Reagan a globe, pointed to the Arctic, and said "Ron that's ours. We own it lock, stock, and icebergs." A simple statement, it summed up Ottawa's official policy: Canada owns the icy waters that wind their way through the Arctic Archipelago. Behind the scenes, however, successive governments have spent over a century trying to figure out how to enforce this claim and on which le...
Jan 21, 2023•59 min•Ep. 16
In Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (UNC Press, 2022), Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their li...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 351
This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world. In License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport (U California Press, 2022), Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you will: Peruse the passports of artists and intellectuals, writer...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 94
In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (UNC Press, 2023), Emily A. Owens wrestles with the question of why white men paid notoriously high pri...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 350
We claim to judge people for what they intentionally do, but accidents often influence our judgments. In our justice systems, people can be harshly and unfairly blamed for bad luck—but in our personal lives, taking on blame isn’t always a bad thing. Guests Fiery Cushman, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University Daniel Statman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https...
Jan 18, 2023•27 min•Ep. 17
We have been ruled long enough. It is time to govern ourselves. If we are to get past the Constitution and all systems based on constitutions, we need to move past the nation state as the means by which we are governed from above. – Robert Ovetz, We the Elites (2022, p. 167) Written by 55 of the richest white men of early America, and signed by only 39 of them, the constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth, and misinformation -...
Jan 18, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 170
It is commonly thought that, thanks to globalization, nation-state borders are becoming increasingly porous. In Sorting Machines: The Reinvention of the Border in the 21st Century (Polity, 2022) Steffen Mau shows that this view is misleading: borders are not getting more permeable in the era of globalization, but rather are being turned into powerful sorting machines. Today they fulfill their separation function better and more effectively than ever. While the cross-border movement of people has...
Jan 18, 2023•42 min•Ep. 350
International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an 'atrocity' is remains undefined and undertheorized. Randle C. DeFalco's book Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 174
