Unsettled Waters

Eric P. Perramond, Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West (University of California Press, 2019). 

In the American West, water adjudication lawsuits are adversarial, expensive, and lengthy. Unsettled Waters is the first detailed study of water adjudications in New Mexico. The state envisioned adjudication as a straightforward accounting of water rights as private property. However, adjudication resurfaced tensions and created conflicts among water sovereigns at multiple scales. Based on more than ten years of fieldwork, this book tells a fascinating story of resistance involving communal water cultures, Native rights and cleaved identities, clashing experts, and unintended outcomes. Whether the state can alter adjudications to meet the water demands in the twenty-first century will have serious consequences. 

-Publisher's Description

The Supreme Court

Tom S. Clark, The Supreme Court: An Analytic History of Constitutional Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

This book presents a quantitative history of constitutional law in the United States and brings together humanistic and social-scientific approaches to studying law. Using theoretical models of adjudication, Tom S. Clark presents a statistical model of law and uses the model to document the historical development of constitutional law. Using sophisticated statistical methods and historical analysis of Court decisions, the author documents how social and political forces shape the path of law. Spanning the history of constitutional law since Reconstruction, this book illustrates the way in which the law evolves with American life and argues that a social-scientific approach to the history of law illuminates connections across disparate areas of law, connected by the social context in which the Constitution has been interpreted. 

-Publisher's Description

Lawless

Nicolas P. Suzor, Lawless: The Secret Rules that Govern Our Digital Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 

Rampant abuse, hate speech, censorship, bias, and disinformation -- our internet has problems. It is governed by technology companies -- search engines, social media platforms, and infrastructure providers -- whose hidden rules influence what we are allowed to see and say. In Lawless, Nicolas P. Suzor presents gripping examples of exactly how tech companies govern our digital environment and how they bend to pressure from governments and other powerful actors to censor and control the flow of information online. We are at a constitutional moment -- an opportunity to rethink the basic rules of how the internet is governed. Suzor offers a vision of a vibrant, diverse, and flourishing internet that can protect our fundamental rights from the lawless rule of tech. The culmination of more than ten years of original research, this groundbreaking work should be read by anyone who cares about the internet and the future of our shared social spaces. 

-Publisher's Description

Cryptocurrencies in Public and Private Law

David Fox & Sarah Green, Cryptocurrencies in Public and Private Law (Oxford University Press, 2019). 

The meteoric rise in the use of cryptocurrencies necessitates that all these difficult legal and sociological questions be urgently examined. This book does so. It is not confined to English law, nor even European legal systems, but considers the problems from the viewpoint of Asian law systems as well. The distinguished authors, all specialists in the topics they address in each of the ten substantive chapters, explain the problems and suggest solutions in a clear and concise way. For any lawyer, like me, who is having to grapple with the legal aspects of cryptocurrencies for the first time, this book is a godsend. And for those who are tyros, the deep and careful analyses that are given in each chapter will provide answers to problems or leads to further study. 

-Richard Aikens (foreword)

Erotic Subjects and Outlaws

 Serena Petrella, Erotic Subjects and Outlaws: Sketching the Borders of Sexual Citizenship (Brill, 2019). 

This book examines the intricacies of emergent sexual citizenship. Designed for academics and broader audiences alike, the collection covers the theorization of sexual citizenship, the exploration of case studies in law, the relationship between sexual citizenship and bio-politics, and finally the erotic dissidence of sexual outlaws. The borders of sexual citizenship are traced, as authors investigate what it means to be 'inside,' as erotic subjects, or outside, as 'sexual outlaws.' The issues of inclusion and exclusion are approached through diverse methodological and analytical lenses: some articles are theoretical and philosophical; others are empirically based, presenting the findings of sociological and ethnographic research projects and some are textual analyses of religious texts, film texts, and of legal discourse. 

-Publisher's Description