New Books in Law

Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Michael Stauch to discuss how the US immigration system has always been “racist by design.” Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (Norton, 2026), Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly "whites-only," and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today.
Highlights include:
- How an “Exclusion Quartet” of rulings by the Supreme Court in the late 19th century “unhinged” the Constitution from immigration policy;
- How the “family reunification” clause of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, meant to favor European migrants, combined with global instability in the 1970s and ‘80s to create an enormous wave of non-white immigrants to the United States;
- What changed (and didn’t change) in immigration policy during World War II and the Cold War;
- How guestworker programs, asylum restrictions, and the US “visa dome” contribute to the racist-by-design immigration regime;
- How immigrants and their advocates have long used cracks and loopholes in immigration legislation to create space for themselves in the United States.
Guest: Kelly Lytle Hernández is a Professor in the Departments of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she also holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, and the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022).
Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book, advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice.

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The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford UP, 2025) explores anti-smuggling law enforcement and criminal prosecutions to reveal a key site—the criminal court—where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted.
Taking readers from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, Fırat Bozçalı examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the help of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework procedures, rules, and reasonings in ways that interrupt the courts' capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. Bozçalı theorizes this evasive engagement with the legal system as a strategy of techno-legal politics among marginalized and persecuted groups, one that extends beyond the Kurdish case. Smuggling Law holds profound relevance in today's world, where ever-expanding regimes of surveillance, oppression, and dispossession unfold in the broader contexts of the global war on terror and data-driven capitalism.

Fırat Bozçalı is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

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For those concerned with how city hall can shape the look and feel of a neighborhood, the mere mention of zoning may invite denunciation of zoning practices that contributed substantially to the housing crisis and so limited neighborhood development that you have to get in your car to pick up a quart of milk.
In her readable Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton, 2024), Sara Bronin, the Freda Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University, points out if you want to put up a single-family house of around 2,500 square feet, then at a minimum you may be required to purchase a 43,350 square foot (one acre) lot on which you but nobody else can build. No wonder we have a housing shortage. And after you move in, you will likely find yourself living in a neighborhood zoned “residential,” that is without stores or businesses within walking distance. So it will be necessary to own a car for shopping and just about everything else.
In this conversation and in Key to the City, Professor Bronin suggests addressing the housing shortage by amending local zoning to make it possible to build several houses per acre. Then too neighborhoods currently zoned “residential” might re-designated for “mixed uses” so that one might walk to stores and restaurants. But Bronin cautions that however inviting the notion of strolling over to the grocery, café or bookstore, how would you feel if a gas station, used car lot or strip joint opened in your neighborhood?
By no means confined to the ivory tower, Professor Bronin, who served for seven years on Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission, recognizes that the underlying purpose of zoning––to protect the homeowner from unwanted intrusions––remains valid. And after showing how Hartford, Minneapolis, Tucson, and Baltimore went about revising their zoning ordinances, she concludes that zoning remains an essential tool for developing decent neighborhoods. She then implicitly invites us to take a walk around the block to consider what might be done to make our neighborhood all the better. 

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We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions (U Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Lee M. Panich & Gustavo Flores explores how Native people in the southern San Francisco Bay Area—the ancestors of today’s Ohlone community—navigated the collapse of the California mission system. The volume spans from Mexican independence in 1821 through the region’s annexation by the United States in 1846, as Native people from Mission Santa Clara and Mission San José fought for emancipation and restitution amid rapidly changing colonial circumstances.
The narrative is driven by a reexamination of archives related to the Pueblo of San José, the territorial capital of Monterey, and early U.S. court cases regarding Mexican-era land grants, contextualized through an in-depth analysis of mission records that illuminate the complex social connections of Native individuals and families. We Will Receive Justice offers an ethnohistorical lens for viewing the Indigenous history of Mexican California, examining not simply the history of colonization but how Native people drew on cultural traditions and social relationships to create new lives for themselves in the wake of the Franciscan mission system.
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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