New Books in Law

Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award Winner of the 2025 Avern Cohn Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2025, A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 selection A Christian Science Monitor 25 Best Books of 2025 The epic story of Detroit’s struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North. In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (FSG, 2025), the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

My guest today is Michelle Adams. Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026)illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

They were perhaps an unlikely trio: professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our time. In The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet (MIT Press, 2026), Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018, to the bill’s near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021, to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU with her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too. Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made. Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That’s the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

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