New Books in Law

Edward Blum interviews David N. Gellman on his book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Cornell UP, 2022).

In Liberty's Chain, David N. Gellman shows how the Jay family, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, embodied the contradictions of the revolutionary age. The Jays of New York were a preeminent founding family. John Jay, diplomat, Supreme Court justice, and coauthor of the Federalist Papers, and his children and grandchildren helped chart the course of the Early American Republic.Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William Jay and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.

The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.
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Homosexuality in Central Asia: Stories of Hardship and Hope
(Barnes and Noble Press, 2026) is Ryan Michael Schweitzer's collection
of first-hand narratives from LGBTQ individuals across Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Drawing on years
of fieldwork in the region, Schweitzer gathers stories of violence,
blackmail, forced marriage, surveillance, and exile alongside quieter
accounts of love, friendship, and endurance. Rather than presenting a
single Central Asian LGBTQ experience, the book traces how legal status,
state security apparatuses, family structure, and religious revival
intersect differently in each country to shape what visibility and
safety look like for queer people in the region.

About the host

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a
Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University
of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement,
identity, gender and nationalism—and in the ways these intersect within
the Central Asia context.
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In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Yana Skorobogatov about her book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union
(University of Chicago Press, 2026). From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet
Union, nearly 40,000 citizens were executed after the death penalty was
reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands
introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of
all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to
escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.
Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov
recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. The book is a
striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who
dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a
corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands
brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms,
courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into
the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and
friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the
wake of violent tragedy.
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A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests
positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her
newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children
they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend
nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager
takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is sentenced to 126
years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system
that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but
for who they are.

In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted
women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
(New Press, 2026), Dr. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence
Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia
Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a
husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into
murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions
disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are
recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched
stereotypes.

Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Dr. Beety
exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and
cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe
v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the
reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal
system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood,
and queer identity itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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There were two days to Christmas
and Lewis felt like everything was spinning out of control. He wondered
what he would say to the judge this time. His client, Rikihana, was
already on multiple shoplifting charges. What’s a few more? Lewis thought. These supermarkets were still making a killing.

It’s
late 2020. Rikihana Wallace, a prolific shoplifter of no fixed abode,
is back in prison with little chance of bail. Nathan Morley, unemployed,
is facing burglary charges and hoping his other, as yet undetected,
offences don’t catch up with him. Lewis Skerrett, their overstretched
legal aid lawyer, is trying to do right by them both.

The culmination of over two years of field research and hundreds of hours of interviews, The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City (Bridget Williams Books, 2026) follows
these three Hutt Valley men through courtrooms, prison, hospital,
rehab, boarding houses and welfare offices. Told largely in
verbatim dialogue, this up-close and personal account brings the
realities of the New Zealand criminal justice system to life through the
voices of those who experience it first-hand.

Watch the book trailer here 

Asher
Emanuel is a writer and lawyer based in Wellington. His exposure to the
criminal justice system began when he was a judges’ clerk at the
Wellington High Court after graduating from law school in 2015. He later
worked as an investigator for the Inspector-General of Intelligence and
Security and, as a lawyer, has assisted
several government inquiries. His writing on justice and policy issues
has appeared in The Spinoff, the New Zealand Herald, and specialist
publications, and he is a former editor of Policy.nz, an election policy
website. He began work on his first book, The Valley,
in 2018 supported by grants from the Michael & Suzanne Borrin
Foundation. Asher now works as a civil legal aid lawyer focusing on
public law and human rights cases. He is a longstanding member of the
executive of the Aotearoa Legal Workers’ Union. Asher grew up in
Auckland before moving to Wellington where he studied law and English
literature.

Ed Amon has a Master of Indigenous Studies and is a PhD Candidate
at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a writer and a
Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics,
history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at edamonnz@gmail.com
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