New Books in Law

Since the arrival of Columbus, thousands of perpetrators have gotten away with murder, burying evidence of their crimes in police reports and court testimony. How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit People in the Americas (Beacon, 2026) unearths that hidden evidence to expose the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people (MMIW2S).

Historian and citizen of Cherokee Nation Liza Black examines five cases in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, from 1908 to 2017. Rejecting narratives that blame victims’ poverty or trauma, Dr. Black dissects police files, coroners’ reports, and court records to uncover a harsh historical reality: The evidence of settler violence has been hiding in plain sight.

This landmark work delivers a damning verdict: The same systems of law and policing that have targeted Native people for centuries have also shielded their killers. Through meticulous archival interrogation, Dr. Black demonstrates how police, courts, and coroners have functioned not as instruments of justice but as pillars of a system designed to protect settler violence.
Guest: Dr. Liza Black is a historian who employs forensic archival methods within 19th and 20th century North America. As a 2024–25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, she excavated institutional and state-sanctioned archives to trace asymmetrical sovereignty. Her research there resulted in How Settlers Get Away with Murder: The Killing of Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit People in the Americas (Beacon, 2026).
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an experienced writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore the stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Playlist for listeners:
Whiskey Tender
A Calm and Normal Heart
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Night of the Living Rez
The Diné Reader
Living Resistance
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In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital in Rockville, Maryland, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters.
Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge. When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry (U California Press, 2026) excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.
Eric talks with host Emily Dufton about his research techniques, the meaning of Chestnut Lodge and Osheroff's challenge to its care, and the limits of psychiatry.
Emily Dufton is a drug historian and the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America and Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs.

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In this episode, Chella Ward interviews Dr Asim Qureshi about the relationship between Islamophobia, the counter-terror framework and freedom of speech. Asim is the Research Director at CAGE International, and the author of numerous important books and articles about Islamophobia, racism and political prisoners including I Refuse to Condemn and A Virtue of Disobedience. His conversation with Chella took place as part of the Islamophobia Awareness Month events at the Open University in 2026.

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In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, special counsel at Human Rights First and author of Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay (Humanitas Media, 2025). Drawing on his work representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Colangelo-Bryan recounts the legal battles, harsh detention conditions, and personal relationships that shaped his experience. He also reflects on the legacy of Guantanamo, the erosion of due process, and the troubling parallels between the post-9/11 response to terrorism and the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants today. Their conversation explores what Guantanamo reveals about the fragility of human rights and the enduring importance of legal protections against government abuse.

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The national parks are loved by many Americans and visitors from around the world. Yet, few realize how often these landscapes and their history have been shaped by questions answered in the courts. With more than 3,500 lawsuits involving the National Park Service, litigation has shaped and defined the character of the parks. Litigation has determined how land can be added to national parks, answered questions about treaty and free speech rights on park land, and settled numerous other disputes that have helped determine what the parks look like today. In her new book National Parks and the Supreme Court: Groundbreaking Legal Battles (University of Nevada Press, 2026), Carla Chung Mattix examines five landmark Supreme Court cases involving national parks over the course of nearly a century. These cases provide readers with a new lens to understanding the parks and help them understand the role of the courts in the nation's public lands. In this episode, Mattix, who was an attorney for the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of the Solicitor for 25 years, discusses her new book and the Court's influence on the national parks.

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