New Books in Law

“Japanese war crimes are notorious. During the Second World War, as Japanese forces overran Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they massacred, murdered, raped, and tortured Asians and Westerners who fell into their hands. They also mistreated hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian internees. After the war ended in 1945, the victorious Allied powers conducted trials in which they brought Japanese perpetrators to justice, as they also did with Germans in Europe…

In this provocative new book, Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away, published by University of Hawaiʻi Press (2026), historians Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson analyse thirteen case studies of Japanese war crimes. They attempt to answer a crucial question with contemporary relevance, how does one become a war criminal?
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The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women (Duke UP, 2026) examines U.S. laws designed to rescue immigrant survivors from gender and sexual violence only if they agree to cooperate with policing. Drawing upon ethnographic stories with legal and social service advocates who work with Asian immigrant women, the book engages abolition feminisms and antiblackness to critique "victim" as a genre of the human in law and produced through racial configurations of the model minority myth and the good/bad immigrant paradigm.

Author Lee Ann S. Wang is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies. She is also a Co-PI on the research initiative, Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories, housed at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.
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The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa (Princeton UP, 2026) Jeanne-Marie Jackson positions his career as an intriguing case study of anticolonial literature and politics. Jackson maps the contours of Casely Hayford’s thought through sustained attention to his written work within its Gold Coast and British imperial contexts, demonstrating the far-reaching conceptual and aesthetic resources of his elite legal background.Treating Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, as a constitutional document and his legal writings as literary exemplars, Jackson breaks down artificial divisions between African textual traditions. The law, for Casely Hayford and his Fante nationalist peers, was intimately bound to the virtues they attached to textuality: clear-headedness, moderation, restraint, and public discernment. Jackson argues for this liberal disposition as a crucial and neglected part of anticolonial intellectual and political history. Colonial-era legal debates framed the rise of an influential, consummately modern Gold Coast leader deemed fit to steer ambitious new pan-African institutions, and, in Jackson’s telling, Casely Hayford emerges as his era’s most emblematic figure.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.
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This volume brings law to life through a free and lively dialogue on the new Model European Rules of Civil Procedure. In it, some of Europe's leading jurists engage in a free-wheeling discussion of the most important issues in procedural law today. With its elegant style and unconventional intellectual approach, Colloquies stands out as a rare gem of comparative legal literature.

Marco de Benito holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Civil Procedure at IE University. His research focuses on comparative civil procedure, international arbitration, private law, and legal history. He arbitrates and advises on international matters.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law - 1200 to 1700(de Gruyter, 2023) shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury. When historians speak of the gap between premodern practice and the legal theory of the time, they tend to ignore the myriad of justifications that filled this gap. Moreover, a focus on justification evens out many of the contrasts that have been alleged to exist between the two worlds, or the Muslim and Christian worlds more generally. The similarities outweigh the differences in the ways people came to terms with the various rules of divine law. The level of flexibility of the theologians and jurists in charge of divine law varied more over time and by topic than between the two worlds. Both worlds also saw the development of ever more sophisticated justifications. Amid the increasing complexity of justifications, a particular kind of reasoning emerged: that good outcomes are more important than upholding rules for their own sake.
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