New Books in Law

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met.

Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors.

Nothing is value-free.

In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Shai Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics. It is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics.

Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel serves as a template for cross-cultural and transcultural research into the moral, ethical, political and social aspects of bioethics.

This episode originally aired on 8/12/2019 and was republished on 8/28/2026.
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For years, LGBTQ+ policies worldwide have been crafted based on
heteronormative views, needs, and practices. However, this has gradually
changed over the last two decades as LGBTQ+ individuals have become key
players in the development of gender-based policies. Diego Galego's Queering Public Policy: A Disruptive Yet Inclusive Framework for Policymaking
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) examines these political and social changes,
evaluates how actors have successfully integrated LGBTQ+ needs into the
mainstream policy agenda, and provides a comprehensive guide to
understanding the policymaking processes from an LGBTQ+ perspective.
Drawing on data from Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and the USA, it
presents a systematic framework for understanding "queering public
policy" as a policy process. The final chapter offers a roadmap for
scholars interested in exploring this evolving field further. This book
will appeal to anyone interested in public policy, public
administration, and queer studies.
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One in five children will be sexually abused before their
eighteenth birthday. This isn't a problem confined to a single country,
city, or neighborhood. It's something that happens everywhere, and what
it costs can be enormous: depression, PTSD, and elevated long-term risk
for physical illness, including heart disease and cancer.

In One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis—And What We Can Do to Stop It (Basic
Books, 2026), Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone make the case that
child sexual abuse is not inevitable. It is preventable, and at this
moment in time, we have the tools to stop it before it begins.

Letourneau
and Malone don't stop at describing the problem. The book creates a
clear picture of how much of the harm is caused by other children. They
lay out a road map, built on years of research and real compassion, for
keeping kids safe and reaching young people at risk of causing harm
before anyone gets hurt.

In this episode of the New
Books Network, we follow that road map and ask what changes when
prevention rather than punishment becomes the organizing idea behind
child safety. The conversation is energized and respectful of survivors
and their families, and it projects an urgency that does not lose hope.

I
hope you find it worth your time. I think you will, if you are
interested in what child sexual abuse prevention can look like in 2026.

- Aniss Benelmouffok
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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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