New Books in Law

In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping up along the way; rather, he lays them all bare in service of paving an actionable path toward the decarbonization and democratization of power.

Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads their legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute.

Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism.
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Ganja
is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian
languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species
Cannabis sativa L. Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's
colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how
ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the subcontinent.

Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India
(University of California Press, 2026) is an open-access book that
follows the perpetual incongruity between regulatory efforts to pursue
the plant through botanical observation, colonial reportage, and excise
statistics and the leisurely, devotional, and creative ganja pursuits
among people. Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya offers a social history of
ganja in a multispecies framework that reveals how the cannabis plant
co-constituted histories of empire, gender, subalternity, and labor
under British rule. Against the weight of the criminalization and
"drug-ness" of cannabis, Dr. Chattopadhyaya puts the multidirectional
and polysemic history of ganja as plant matter at the center of
analysis.

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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Should willingness to kill be a requirement for U.S. citizenship? Girl Without a Country: The Untold Story of a Landmark Fight for U.S. Citizenship (Purdue University Press, 2026) by Rick Ramseyer tells the compelling, confounding story of Martha Graber—a Mennonite, registered nurse, and conscientious objector who in 1929 was twice denied citizenship because she refused to say she would take up arms to defend the United States. The unexpected denials, which came despite Martha's pledge to give her life for her adopted country, caught the attention of a diverse group of peace advocates, religious leaders, lawyers, and politicians, setting up a climactic third court appearance.

Martha’s nineteen-month fight for citizenship made national news, featuring dramatic testimony, historical insights, and interesting backstories that stretched from Alsace-Lorraine in western Europe to America’s heartland. Elegantly written by Martha’s maternal grandson with never-before-published details and closely connected with a controversial Supreme Court decision, Girl Without a Country surfaces an array of topical issues, ranging from immigration and naturalization to conscientious objection and patriotism. Perhaps most importantly, Martha’s story considers what it truly means to be an American.

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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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

A leading historian’s revelatory exploration of antisemitism in the
United States—from 1940s anti-Jewish riots until today—showing that it
has long served as a frontline in our wars over freedom of speech and
the nature of American liberalism Few issues are as vexed today as
antisemitism and free speech. There is scarcely an arena—college
campuses, congressional hearings, immigration courtrooms, social media
platforms—where we are not polarized over what counts as antisemitism,
which speech is protected by the First Amendment, and what the law
should do about hatred. At a time of political crisis, antisemitism has
become a point of ideological obsession. None of this is new. In a
sweeping history of ideas and law, James Loeffler recovers the forgotten
roots of our contemporary turmoil. From two antisemitic riots in
postwar Chicago to a neo-Nazi march in 1970s Skokie, Illinois, and the
Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in our own time, Loeffler explores
the ways in which America’s courts have grappled with hatred, freedom,
and the tensions at the heart of liberal democracy: Are some hatreds
more dangerous than others? Is tolerating hate speech the price we must
pay for free speech? And can liberalism ever make good on its promise to
end hatred through law? Confronting these questions, Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America (Metropolitan Books, 2026) restores
a missing history of hate speech, antisemitism, and the law, one that
points to how we might protect difference without surrendering our
principles of equality and freedom.

James Loeffler is an award-winning historian, and Felix Posen
Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University and the
author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth
Century. Previously he taught at the University of Virginia and served
as Dean’s Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center.
Currently a Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute
of North America, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New
Republic.
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Shadow Negotiators: How UN Organizations Shape the Rules of World Trade for Food Security
(Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Matias E. Margulis is the
first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have
intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of
international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO,
Dr. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow
negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the
trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on
analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics,
agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four
different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
(SRRTF).

By
identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to
shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations
chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the
WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of
concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for
world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining
their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right
to food.

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