Episodios

  • Emotions of LGBT Rights
    Apr 6 2026
    In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks to Senthorun Raj about the Emotions of LGBT Rights. Emotions from disgust and fear to love and joy shape the legal frameworks that attempt to govern human sexual behavior around the world. Sen cautions against dividing emotions into good and bad, but instead asks us to take a critical stance on all emotions, to understand how they shape our policies. In the episode, we talk about Sara Ahmed, the Stonewall Riots, conversion therapy, and efforts to mandate for and against inclusive sex education. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Sen’s book, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press 2025) uses emotion as a novel analytic lens to understand, analyse, and critique the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and institutional conflicts over LGBT rights. Emotions are central to the pursuit, organisation, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in law. Drawing from critical legal theories, this book cultivates the concept of “emotional grammar” to show how emotions structure law reform pursuits by threading together Hansard, legislation, case law, law reform consultations, and statutory guidance. By doing so, it explains why addressing this emotional grammar is important for scholars, lawyers, judges, legislators, and activists seeking to navigate conflicts over LGBT rights and reforms that aim to repair the inequalities faced by LGBT people. Senthorun Raj is an academic human rights lawyer with expertise in issues of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. He works as a Reader in Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sen’s research and teaching interests include LGBTIQ+ rights, emotion, culture, equalities and human rights law, legal education, and critical legal theory. His latest monograph, builds on his previous book, Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020), which explored the ways emotions shape legal judgments that enable progress for LGBT people. He is also the co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025). The image for this episode is a coloured lithograph, from 1868, depicting a double rainbow, by René Henri Digeon after Étienne Antoine Eugène Ronjat. It was sourced by Lili Epstein for High Theory from the Wellcome Collection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    21 m
  • Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, "Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State" (Cornell UP, 2017)
    Apr 4 2026
    The book, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Cornell UP, 2017) is Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello’s efforts to account for the origins and strategies of the women's suffrage movement in the New York State. The book dwelled on evolution of the women’s suffrage movement in the progressive era and discusses the various suffragist strategies employed in quest for women’s right to franchise from early legislative petitions to more innovative marketing approaches. It explains how the women’s suffrage movement evolved over time, using various tactics like petitions, parades, and door-to-door canvassing. The book highlights the diverse groups that supported the suffrage movement, including rural women, working-class immigrants, and African American women, all united by their common interest in gaining the right to vote. The book also acknowledges the different ideologies of the suffragist groups and their approaches to activism. Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ LinkedIn | ORCID | Meta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    43 m
  • Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson, "Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away" (U Hawaiʻi Press, 2026)
    Apr 1 2026
    “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? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    1 h
  • Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)
    Apr 1 2026
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    1 h y 10 m
  • Jeanne-Marie Jackson, "The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa" (Princeton UP, 2026)
    Mar 31 2026
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    1 h y 10 m
  • Colloquies on European Civil Procedure: A Conversation with Marco de Benito
    Mar 28 2026
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    40 m
  • Joanna Siekiera ed., "NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment" (NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence, 2024)
    Mar 25 2026
    Since the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, NATO has been in a period of transition to adapting to the new international security environment that is mark by great instability and violations of international law. These types of situation have in recent years have been labelled "grey-zone" style threats that can be dangerous but may avoid the official legal definition of warlike activity. To combat this concerning situation has arisen the concept of "Stability Policing" that helps ensure that the rule of law is established and preserved in the long run. This includes the effective cooperation between military and civil law enforcement together to achieving long-term stability in troubled areas. The NATO Stability Policing Centre Of Excellence commissioned its own extensive three volume study NATO Stability Policing: Beneficial Tool in Filling the Security Gap and Establishing the Rule of Law, and a Safe and Secure Environment (2024)edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera to investigate the nature and challenges of such stability operations. The three volumes are available online:The Stability Policing Trilogy Volume I – PastThe Stability Policing Trilogy Volume II – PresentThe Stability Policing Trilogy Volume III – Future Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an expert in international law, NATO consultant, trainer, and educator. She has previously been featured on the New Books Network for 21st Century as the Pacific Century. Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition (Warsaw University Press, 2023), Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond (Marine Corps University Press, 2025), and International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025). Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    1 h y 10 m
  • Gijs Kruijtzer, "Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law - 1200 to 1700" (de Gruyter, 2023)
    Mar 25 2026
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law
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    58 m