This is the final episode of Cited’s most recent season, Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise, a season that tells stories of the political and scholarly battles behind the economic ideas that shape our world. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page . They will back with a new season focussed on environmental politics in early 2025, so make sure you are subscribed to the podcast ( Apple , Spotify , manual RSS ). The MAGA movement scores big wins by ta...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 72
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrat...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 377
How does a Black man in Austin get sent to prison on a 70-year sentence for stealing a tuna sandwich, likely costing Texas taxpayers roughly a million dollars? In America, your liberty--or even your life--may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If the same man had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it's unlikely that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the...
Nov 24, 2024•50 min•Ep. 24
An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by gro...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 748
An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy? In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by gro...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 748
It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “ Robots Should be Slaves .” We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing members of a community. Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their...
Nov 20, 2024•29 min•Ep. 20
What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United Sta...
Nov 18, 2024•53 min•Ep. 280
Saadia Yacoob’s excellent new book, Beyond the Binary: Gender and Legal Personhood in Islamic Law (U of California Press 2024), makes a compelling argument about gender and Islamic law that has been shockingly overlooked: Legal personhood in Islamic law is intersectional and relational, and gender is not a binary. While Muslims commonly treat gender as a fixed, stand-alone category in Islam that fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status, Yacoob shows that that legal status in Islamic law...
Nov 16, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 344
How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.” China’s e-commerce b...
Nov 16, 2024•55 min•Ep. 163
The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its alleged ability to harm and corrupt young people and indeed society as a whole, the genre is constantly under pressure to suppress that which has made it so popular to begin with - its ability to frighten and generate discussion about society's darker side. In The Myth of Harm: Horror, Censorship and the Child (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Sarah Cleary analyses controversies...
Nov 12, 2024•57 min•Ep. 219
The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights move...
Nov 11, 2024•56 min•Ep. 746
I spoke with an accomplished attorney and innovative law professor Rodger Citron of the Touro Law School about the complex relationships between history and... yes, law. We talked about how the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals after World War II shaped the US legal philosophy. We dug into themes like the tensions between originalism and evolving interpretations of the Constitution and how judges’ personal histories impact supposedly objective rulings. We discussed Judge Irving Kaufman (famous ...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 14
In this week’s episode we step into conversation with Keith Whittington about his new book, The Impeachment Power: The Law, Politics, and Purpose of an Extraordinary Constitutional Tool (Princeton UP, 2024), we explored the historical and constitutional dimensions of impeachment in American politics. Whittington provided a detailed account of how the Founders intended impeachment to function as a safeguard against executive overreach. We discussed the evolution of impeachment cases, from Andrew ...
Nov 06, 2024•49 min•Ep. 126
There has been a lot of commentary from scholars and journalists as to the meaning of Donald Trump’s three appointments to the United States Supreme Court – with regards to changes in jurisprudence, increased separation of the Court from political processes that legitimate it. Drs. Kirsten Widner and Anna Gunderson have done something a little different using tools from political science. Their new book, The Haves and Have-Nots in Supreme Court Representation and Participation, 2016 to 2021 (Cam...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 745
Dr Laura Smith-Khan speaks with Dr Anthea Vogl about her new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge UP, 2024). The conversation introduces listeners to the procedures involved in seeking asylum in the global north and how language is implicated throughout these processes. Discussing Dr Vogl’s new book and research, the podcast explores the difficult narrative demands these processes place on those seeking asylum, and the sociopolitical con...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 35
In this episode, we interview Prof. Bernard Freamon on his new book Possessed by the Right Hand . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
Oct 23, 2024•28 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flung corners of these war-torn countries were subjected to background checks and instructed about inter...
Oct 19, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 108
Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections shielding them from political interventions. Those assumptions might always have been more hopeful tha...
Oct 17, 2024•54 min•Ep. 190
In this episode, we talk to Professor Jonathan Brown about his book, Slavery and Islam . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
Oct 16, 2024•37 min•Ep. 19
In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes , we sit down with Dr. Paul DeHart, professor of Political Science at Texas State University and author of The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent (University of Missouri Press, 2024). In this illuminating discussion, Dr. DeHart challenges the prevailing belief that social contract theory and classical natural law are fundamentally incompatible. His book offers a bold argument: political authority and obligation cannot be g...
Oct 16, 2024•58 min•Ep. 123
Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (UNC Press, 2024) recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights ...
Oct 14, 2024•54 min•Ep. 1489
Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for women who face immense barriers to ac...
Oct 12, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 242
What is it like to be a human rights lawyer in Thailand? How does the new generation of 2020s political activists differ from those of previous eras? In this episode of Talking Thai Politics , we talk to Kunthika Nutcharut about her work with Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. Kunthika comes from a political family – her lawyer father Krisadang Nutcharut was a student activisit in the 1970s – and she studied and worked in Germany before deciding to return to Thailand to taken on the challenging work...
Oct 11, 2024•34 min•Ep. 3
In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wa...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 281
“It’s a free country.” Many of us recall saying that as children as we learned that we were American citizens who were endowed with certain rights—such as free speech. We would use those words when we wanted to assert our own rights when we were being bullied or chastised. We would use them to let others know that even if we did not agree with what they were saying or doing, they were within their rights to express certain opinions or to do certain things. How many American adults feel as confid...
Oct 07, 2024•28 min•Ep. 234
What threatens American democracy and the rule of law? In her new book, Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians (NYU Press, 2024), legal scholar and campaign spending expert Ciara Torres-Spelliscy argues that the USA’s privately-funded campaign finance system – combined with corporate greed and antidemocratic strains in the modern Republican Party – endangers American democracy. As she sees it, unseen political actors and untraceable dark money influence ...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 742
It is an era of expansion for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an increasingly influential actor in the global governance of migration. Bringing together leading experts in international law and international relations, this collection examines the dynamics and implications of IOM's expansion in a new way. Analyzing IOM as an international organization (IO), IOM Unbound?: Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion (Cam...
Oct 05, 2024•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 233
Law professors Jon Michaels and David Noll use their expertise to expose how state-supported forms of vigilantism are being deployed by MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists to roll back civil, political, and privacy rights and subvert American democracy. Beyond identifying the dangers of vigilantism, Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy (Atria/One Signal, 2024) functions as a call to arms with a playbook for a democratic response. Michaels and Noll look bac...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 740
The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended the presiding deity, was required to open its doors to all Hindus. The decision in Indian Younger L...
Oct 03, 2024•33 min•Ep. 356
We commonly think of democracy as a social order governed by the people’s collective will. Given the size of the modern states, this picture is typically adjusted to say that democracy is a system of representative government , where elected officials are tasked with governing in ways that reflect the collective will of their constituents. Although it is familiar, this way of depicting democracy invites difficulties. The concept of a collective will is notoriously difficult to nail down. And, mo...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 354
