Looking for your next read? Check out the latest books by Colorado Law faculty.
Ahmed White
Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers (University of California Press)
In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union, whose members were known as the “Wobblies,” was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign.
Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by industrial capitalism the promise of a better world. But its growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution and driven by uncompromising militancy, was seen by powerful capitalists and government officials as an existential threat that had to be eliminated. White documents the torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, lays bare the origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know today, and uncovers disturbing truths about the law, political repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class society. The book was named the International Labor History Association’s Book of the Year Award for 2022 and received Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section’s 2022 Richard A. Lester Book Award.
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Andrew Schwartz
Investment Crowdfunding (Oxford University Press)
Andrew Schwartz, a global expert in the field of investment crowdfunding and Fulbright scholar, presents a comprehensive guide to a new online marketplace for entrepreneurial capital. He marries theory with a decade of on-the-ground research to give lawyers, students, scholars, and policymakers a one-stop shop for everything they need to know about investment crowdfunding, its regulation, and how to improve it. Readers will find Investment Crowdfunding an accessible and engaging introduction into what is poised to become a household phrase.
This book analyzes American law—in particular, the JOBS Act and Regulation Crowdfunding—and compares it to the legal regimes in the UK, Canada, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand. Schwartz's prescription is liberal in the classical sense: policymakers should rely on private ordering and financial incentives, rather than law and regulation, to govern and police the market. Constituting the definitive guide to the law and regulation of investment crowdfunding, the book provides a roadmap for policymakers to enact an effective regulatory framework for investment crowdfunding.
Lolita Buckner Inniss
The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson (Fordham University Press)
James Collins Johnson made his name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey, where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a student from Maryland, arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. On the eve of his rendition, after attempts to free Johnson by force had failed, a local aristocratic white woman purchased Johnson’s freedom, allowing him to avoid reenslavement.
The Princeton Fugitive Slave reconstructs Johnson’s life, from birth and enslaved life in Maryland to his daring escape, sensational trial for re-enslavement, and last-minute change of fortune, and through to the end of his life in Princeton, where he remained a figure of local fascination. Lolita Buckner Inniss builds a picture of Johnson on his own terms, piecing together the sparse evidence and disaggregating him from the other Black vendors with whom he was sometimes confused.
By telling Johnson’s story and examining the relationship between antebellum Princeton’s Black residents and the economic engine that supported their community, the book questions the distinction between employment and servitude that shrinks and threatens to disappear when an individual’s freedom is circumscribed by immobility, lack of opportunity, and contingency on local interpretations of a hotly contested body of law. The Princeton Fugitive Slave won the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Book Award, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, and has been adopted for use in university classrooms around the country.
Jennifer Hendricks
Essentially a Mother: A Feminist Approach to the Law of Pregnancy and Motherhood (University of California Press)
Essentially a Mother argues that the law of pregnancy and motherhood has been overrun by sexist ideology. Courts have held that a pregnant woman’s nine months of gestation hardly count in her claim to parent the child she bears and that a man’s brief moment of ejaculation matters more than a woman’s labor. Armed with such dubious arguments, courts have stripped women of the right to abortion, treated surrogate mothers as mere vessels, and handed biological fathers—even those who became fathers through rape—automatic rights over women and their children. In this incisive and groundbreaking book, Jennifer Hendricks argues that feminists must overthrow the skewed value system that subordinates women, devalues caregiving, and denies too many the right to parent.
Justin Desautels-Stein
The Right to Exclude: A Critical Race Approach to Sovereignty, Borders, and International Law (Oxford University Press)
In a world where racism and xenophobia are endemic, what is the role of international law? To the extent international rules are thought to have any relevance at all, the typical approach characterizes international law as on the side of racial justice. Human rights instruments like the United Nations' International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are paradigmatic, offering the world international agreements in which governments are directed to avoid racist behavior and promote antiracist action.
In The Right to Exclude, Justin Desautels-Stein goes against the grain and asks whether certain rules of international law might actually produce structures of racial hierarchy, rather than work to limit them. The intellectual fulcrum for this production, Desautels-Stein argues, lies in the ideological structures of sovereignty and property, the right to exclude that is shared in those twinned precincts, and the border regimes that result. Applying critical race theory to contemporary problems of migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, decolonization, and self-determination, Desautels-Stein expounds a theory of "postracial xenophobia," a structure of racial ideology that justifies and legitimates a pragmatic account of racialized foreignness, a racial xenos.
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Pierre Schlag
Twilight of the American State (University of Michigan Press)
The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian.
How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today.
Pierre Schlag maps out a big-picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American spirit.
Paul Campos
A Fan’s Life (University of Chicago Press)
A Fan’s Life dives deep into the experience of being an ardent fan in a world defined more and more by the rhetoric of “winners” and “losers.” In a series of tightly argued chapters that suture together memoir and social critique, Paul Campos chronicles his lifelong passion for University of Michigan football while meditating on fandom in the wake of the unprecedented year of 2020—when, for a time, a global pandemic took away professional and collegiate sports entirely. Fandom isn’t just leisure, he shows; it’s part of who we are, and part of even our politics, which in the age of Donald Trump have become increasingly tribal and bloody. Campos points toward where we might be heading, as our various partisan affiliations—fandoms with a grimly national significance—become even more intense and bitterly self-defining. As he shows, we’re all fans of something, and making sense of fandom itself might offer a way to wrap our heads around our increasingly divided reality, on and off the field.