Some legal history related book reviews from the past week:
In the Times Literary Supplement, T.H. Breen reviews two books on Benjamin Franklin (by Carla Mulford and George Goodwin) and suggests a continuity between his thoughts on income inequality and his equally unpopular conception of an “empire of equal subjects.”
From the Wall Street Journal: John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) reviews Court Martial by Chris Bray. The "central argument," Witt writes, "is that the court-martial and its cousin,
the military commission, have been central participants in the main
storylines of American history, from emancipation and civil rights to
whistleblowing and sexual assault. . . . He also argues, far more contentiously, that military
justice 'is neither better nor worse than civilian justice. It’s just different, in good ways and bad.'"
The Times also published a review of Daniel Czitrom’s New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era, an “evocative account” of a 1892 investigation of police corruption that “reveals that the nexus between politics, policing and biblical trespasses in the late 19th century, introduced the term “organized crime,” spawned the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, demonstrated the power of mass media and even presaged reality television shows”.
The Times also published a review of Daniel Czitrom’s New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era, an “evocative account” of a 1892 investigation of police corruption that “reveals that the nexus between politics, policing and biblical trespasses in the late 19th century, introduced the term “organized crime,” spawned the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, demonstrated the power of mass media and even presaged reality television shows”.
The ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with Risa Goluboff about her new book, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, in the Modern Law Library Podcast.
In Dissent, Linda Gordon reviews two books on abortion rights, including Mary Ziegler’s legal history, which “shows us that it is the failure of the most radical anti-abortion agenda that put us where we are today.” The same issue includes Theda Skocpol’s Who Owns the GOP?, but this is dated Feb. 3.
Finally, in The Nation, Scott Sherman reviews Benedict Anderson’s memoir, A Life Beyond Boundaries, which he recently published in English. Anderson’s “neat and tidy” book, Sherman says, is a “primer for cosmopolitanism.” The book elides much of Anderson’s assessment of the coup d’etat in Indonesia that resulted in the detention of the left-leaning Sukarno as well a series of catastrophic massacres (Anderson and colleagues at Cornell published the “Cornell Paper” in 1966, which argued that the coup and resulting violence were “internal army affairs” rather than a Communist power grab by the PKI). Instead, Anderson focuses on his own intellectual development, rich descriptions of his academic mentors (including one whose anti-colonialism would result in the revocation of his passport--an affair that sounds right out of Sam Lebovic’s ASLH presentation last year) and--my personal favorite--reflections on the solemnity of academic life (chastised for his lack of seriousness, Anderson reflects, “now I understand what traditional Chinese foot-binding must have felt like”).
I also wanted to point readers to a website called Dissertation Reviews, which publishes non-critical reviews of recently published dissertations. Some of the reviews might be of interest to legal historians. For example, this February, Faisal Chaudhry reviewed Jean-Philippe Dequen’s "Evolution of the Place of Islamic Law within the Indian Legal Order, 1600-2014".
