New Books in Law

A leading social critic identifies our least-discussed major crisis, and sets out to solve it.

As Americans debate President Biden’s infirmities and President Trump’s erratic behavior, we’ve neglected the bigger problem before us: a massive transfer of power and wealth to the oldest among us, and the curtailment of the prospects of the young. In Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026), the historian and social critic Samuel Moyn offers a piercing diagnosis of our age divide and its consequences. Even apart from the presidency, in legislatures, businesses, and the courts, the average leader’s age has risen dramatically. The elderly predominantly fund campaigns and dominate their agendas, often with the intent to block any challenge to their status. The tax code is rigged on their behalf, as is an economy geared to sheltering financial and housing assets. The United States was founded on the promise of generational renovation but has become an increasingly febrile country of old men.

But it doesn’t need to be this way. With understanding and wit, Moyn shows how elder power can be dismantled. With strong safety nets in place, mandatory retirement ages can be established. The early transfer of assets between generations could be encouraged and young voters can be granted more voice. In such a world, the elderly themselves would be freed from power games to confront the existential opportunities of aging, while the young would find their path to starting out in life unblocked at
last.

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia
(Cornell University Press, 2026) uncovers colonial South Asia's
critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the
government of British India created a web of institutions for the
scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native
mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on uncovering faked
evidence planted by South Asians. These experts, joining toxicologists
known as "chemical examiners," were supposed to extract objective,
scientific truth in the service of British justice. But in trying to
counteract the presumed tendency of colonized peoples to lie, the system
enabled widespread misconduct by state experts, increasing the risk of
wrongful convictions of South Asian defendants. Through scrupulously
documented legal cases, Mitra Sharafi reveals that colonial dynamics put
special pressure on the relationship between truth and justice.
Examining falsity on both sides of the law through the use of testing to
(mis)identify poisons, blood, and spermatozoa, as well as debates over
adversarialism and inquisitorialism in the colonial courtroom, Fear of
the False explores advances in forensic science and shortcuts in
criminal procedure against the backdrop of colonial mistrust. Thanks
to generous funding from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the
ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through
the Cornell Open initiative.

Mitra Sharafi
is a legal historian whose research focuses on South Asia. She is the
Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison and
currently serves as the president of the American Society for Legal
History. She has been the host of the South Asian Legal History Resources website since 2010.

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Why do some international courts wield broad authority while others face pushback or fade into irrelevance? The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework
(Hart Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Dana Burchardt provides novel
theoretical and empirical insights into this question. It offers a
fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the authority of international
courts, drawing from law, political science and behavioural research.

It
develops, in Part I, a theoretical model and analytical framework for
assessing these questions. The model explains how authority
relationships between courts and their audiences—such as states, NGOs,
individual applicants, and domestic courts—are formed, maintained,
or contested. In Part II, the book applies this analytical framework to
in-depth case studies of two selected international courts: the
European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the Economic
Community of West African States. These studies not only provide deeper
insights into the authority of these courts but also demonstrate
how the analytical framework can be applied to other international
courts to generate an enhanced understanding of international court
authority.

The
book sheds new light on why some courts enjoy enduring authority and
others face pushback, offering powerful tools for understanding the
behaviour of international courts and their audiences.

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

Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the
emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model
of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice
of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and
feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take
responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian academic practices. Its
method of conversation and accountability continues the feminist
tradition of taking reciprocity and the time and place of collaboration
seriously. It helps make visible the specific ties between post-colonial
life and law and joins the work of refusing and reimagining the
hierarchical formation of legal knowledge in a caste-based Indian
society. A significant contribution to the history and practice of
feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India, A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2026) will appeal to both an academic and activist readership.

Debolina
Dutta is a Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School's Centre of
Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW)

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026) begins
with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico
border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Moving
between the practical and the philosophical, forensic anthropologist
and author Gabriella Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and
what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of
haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as
objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.
Centered primarily in Arizona and South Texas, Border Afterlives
offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices,
critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and
calls for a re-imagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in
reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that
insists on remembering the dead.

In this conversation, we discuss
the difficult interplay between federal immigration policy and local
practices of death care on the border, the implications of policies that
cause increased death tolls, the politics of humanitarian immigration
reform, and, finally, how allowing ourselves to be haunted by the slow
mass casualties of the border can and should inspire us to act.

Gabriella
Soto is a contemporary archaeologist who examines the material world to
understand pressing social issues. Integrating ethnographic methods,
GIS technology, and archival research, she specializes in migration
materialities, focusing on Latinx migration and security at the
US-Mexico border. Her work analyzes the material footprints of transit,
forensic death investigations, and security and humanitarian
infrastructure. An ACLS fellow whose work has also been funded by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation, Soto is a research affiliate at the Binational
Migration Institute and holds faculty affiliations at Arizona State
University’s School of Transborder Studies, School of Interdisciplinary
Forensics, and the Latinx Oral History Lab. Her research has appeared in
American Anthropologist and Political Geography, and her article on
migrant material culture won the American Anthropological Association’s
Gordon R. Willey Paper Prize. Dr. Soto is the author of Border
Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of
Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law