New Books in Law

In Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets
(Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Nikhil Kalyanpur examines a
striking feature of today's global legal order: the use of foreign
courts by elites to settle domestic disputes. On the surface, the
"outsourcing" of disputes by elites from countries with fragile
judiciaries looks like a search for fair treatment unavailable at home.
Yet extraterritorial dispute resolution varies across such countries.
Russian plutocrats, for instance, frequently litigate abroad, whereas
Chinese and South African ones rarely do.

Dr. Kalyanpur argues
that the pursuit of extraterritorial litigation depends on the balance
of power between a state and its plutocracy. In contexts of state
capture or state control, the transparency costs associated with
transnational law deter plutocrats from seeking resolution abroad. But
when the state and the plutocracy have relatively equal power, competing
interests can lead to political clashes, with different actors
asserting themselves. "Losers" of these clashes, locked out of their
institutions, now have less to lose from those transparency costs and so
seek resolution abroad. As these elites often escape with much of their
wealth abroad, "winners" respond by weaponizing transnational legal
institutions to seize rivals' offshore assets and ensure defeated rivals
stay defeated.

Through cases from Russia and elsewhere, Dr.
Kalyanpur unravels the connections between offshore finance,
transnational litigation, and intra-elite warfare. He exposes how
liberal courts serve as arenas for emerging market power struggles,
globalizing conflicts begun at home. As billionaires continue amassing
unprecedented power across democracies and autocracies alike, Legal Weapons of the Wealthy lays out how the architects of the liberal economic order defeated themselves by enabling rule by the rich.

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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Truth Commissions and International Law: Jurisdiction, Representation, Authority
(Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines how truth commissions
construct authoritative accounts of conflict, and how they account for
the plurality of accounts across affected communities. Dr. Valeria
Vázquez Guevara examines three of the earliest and most influential
truth commissions: Argentina (1983–1984), Chile (1990–1991), and El
Salvador (1992–1993), and examines how relevant cultural objects support
or counter the official account for each. In doing so, she argues that
these truth commissions drew on international law to authorise their
accounts of violent conflict, and that this had the consequence of
privileging an internationally-authorised truth over other truths,
whilst simultaneously strengthening the authority of international law
over the post-conflict state.

By demonstrating how truth
commissions turn to international law for authority, the book shows how
this produces an official account of past violence and promises of
future community, which fundamentally affects how communities live
together in the aftermath of violent conflict.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers central issues in political philosophy through the lens of this single question. He explores and evaluates recent influential work on this topic and then proposes a novel approach of his own. The puzzle at the heart of his account is the phenomenon of legitimate injustice—laws and policies that are substantively unjust yet may be legitimately imposed by government officials. How can such laws be legitimate if, as some have argued, justice is the first virtue of social institutions?

Quong analyzes the work of those who deny that injustice committed by states can be legitimate simply by virtue of its democratic or procedural pedigree; the Kantian account of legitimate institutions and justice; instrumental approaches to political legitimacy; and the recent wave of work in democratic theory focused on its egalitarian character. Arguing that these analyses do not offer an adequate solution to the puzzle and that there are compelling reasons to revise or reject them, Quong lays out his view and explains the implications for more general theories of political morality. He argues that we can explain legitimate injustice by appeal to distributive justice. If political disagreement is inevitable, then unjust legislation is largely unavoidable; it constitutes a burden that must be distributed according to just principles. Quong’s novel and illuminating framework offers a unique introduction to crucial questions in political philosophy.
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Edward Blum interviews Holly White on her new book Constructing American Childhood: Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States.

As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it’s illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while the legal drinking age remains twenty-one. Are these age-based laws really protecting children, and if not, why do they exist? Holly White uncovers the answers to these questions through a history of America’s first age-based laws.

Analyzing trial records, newspapers, personal letters and diaries, as well as legal statutes from the founding era to the Civil War, White shows how restrictive age-based laws were implemented to benefit those who already held power. Over time, these new laws—coming out of child murder and rape trials as well as guardianship and underage marriage disputes—increasingly circumscribed the rights of young Americans in the early republic. As White shows, race, class, status, and gender influenced who came to benefit from the label of “child” in post-revolutionary America. In so doing, Constructing American Childhood explains why Americans continue to be guided by the age-based legal definitions of childhood and adulthood of our past.
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Between 1933 and 1935, a trial was held in Bern against members of the Swiss extreme right-wing National Front who had distributed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a widely disseminated antisemitic publication that spread lies about Jews. The real target of the Jewish organizations that initiated the trial, however, was the pamphlet itself, its origin, its dissemination, and its use in Europe's fascist movements.

During the course of the trial, both sides received ample support in the form of material assistance and propaganda. The defendants and their supporters in Nazi Germany were able to rely on an extensive network that had been established in the early 1920s to combat “Judaeo-Bolshevism.” This conspiratorial “Antisemitic International” united German völkisch circles, Italian fascists, Russian monarchists, and French conspiracy theorists. On the other side, the plaintiffs actively sought to expose the “Protocols” as a forgery in the hope that this would counteract their impact.

In this lecture, Michael Hagemeister will use the Bern trial as a case study of Jewish legal self-defense in order to shed light on both the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the concerted efforts against the “Antisemitic International” in the 1930s, which have received little attention from historians.

Read more about Michael Hagemeister's research on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This lecture originally took place on April 10, 2024.
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