New ebooks purchased this month: January - February 2024

A selection of  law ebook titles were purchased this month, in association with the ebooks@cambridge team. These are all available through iDiscover, and include:

Childbirth, Vulnerability and Law: Exploring Issues of Violence and Control, edited by Camilla Pickles and Jonathan Herring (Routledge, 2020)

This book is inspired by a statement released by the World Health Organization directed at preventing and eliminating disrespectful and abusive treatment during facility-based childbirth. Exploring the nature of vulnerability during childbirth, and the factors which make childbirth a site for violence and control, the book looks at the role of law in the regulation of professional intervention in childbirth. The WHO statement and other published work on ‘mistreatment’, ‘obstetric violence’, ‘birth trauma’, ‘birth rape’, and ‘dehumanised care’ all point to the presence of vulnerability, violence, and control in childbirth. This collected edition explores these issues in the experience of those giving birth, and for those providing obstetric services. It further offers insights regarding legal avenues of redress in the context of this emerging area of concern. Using violence, vulnerability, and control as a lens through which to consider multiple facets of the law, the book brings together innovative research from an interdisciplinary selection of authors.

Digital Pirates: Policing Intellectual Property in Brazil, by Alexander Sebastian Dent (Stanford University Press, 2020)

Digital Pirates examines the unauthorized creation, distribution, and consumption of movies and music in Brazil. Alexander Sebastian Dent offers a new definition of piracy as indispensable to current capitalism alongside increasing global enforcement of intellectual property (IP). Complex and capricious laws might prohibit it, but piracy remains a core activity of the twenty-first century.

Environmental Counterclaims in Investment Arbitration: Deconstructing the Requirements of Jurisdiction, Connection and Cause of Action, by Andrés Eduardo Alvarado-Garzón (Springer, 2023)

This book critically analyses the availability of environmental counterclaims in investment arbitration presented by the respondent host state against the claimant investor. It starts from the premise that the conflicting relation between investment law and environmental protection cannot always be avoided. Yet, the instrument of environmental counterclaims in investment arbitration might alleviate such relation. Throughout its chapters, this book addresses the questions about the societal and practical relevance of seeking redress for environmental damage in investment arbitration, the functioning of such instrument both in contract-based and treaty-based investment arbitration, the suitability of arbitral tribunals to rule upon environmental issues, and the kind of environmental damages that could be redressed. Most importantly, by deconstructing the requirements of jurisdiction, connection between main claim and counterclaim, and cause of action, this book provides the tools for the re-conceptualisation of the instrument of counterclaims with the hope of harnessing its utility to achieve appropriate redress for environmental damages caused by foreign investors.

Fault in Criminal Law: A Research Companion, edited by Alan Reed and Michael Bohlander, with Bethany Simpson and Verity Adams (Routledge, 2023)

This volume presents a comparative examination of the issue of fault in criminal law. Extant law reveals significant problems in adoption of consistent approaches to doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of fault liability and culpability thresholds in criminal law. This has been exemplified by a plethora of recent jurisprudential authorities revealing varying degrees of confusion and vacillation. This collection focuses on fault liability for inculpation with contributions from leading specialists from different jurisdictions presenting alternative perspectives. The book addresses three specific elements within the arena of fault, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This structure facilitates an examination of UK provisions, with specialist contributions on domestic law, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for content. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems treat a variety of specialised issues relating to fault elements in the context of the criminal law. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, academics, and practitioners working in this area.

Heritage Destruction, Human Rights and International Law, edited by Amy Strecker and Joseph Powderly (Brill Nijhoff, 2023)

This book brings together prominent scholars in the fields of international cultural heritage law and heritage studies to scrutinise the various branches of international law and governance dealing with heritage destruction from human rights perspectives, both in times of armed conflict as well as in peace. Importantly, it also examines cases of heritage destruction that may not be intentional, but rather the consequence of large-scale infrastructural development or resource extraction. Chapters deal with high profile cases from Europe, North Africa, The Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, with a substantial afterword on heritage destruction in Ukraine.

Law, Technology and Society: Reimagining the Regulatory Environment, by Roger Brownsword (Routledge, 2019)

This book considers the implications of the regulatory burden being borne increasingly by technological management rather than by rules of law. If crime is controlled, if human health and safety are secured, if the environment is protected, not by rules but by measures of technological management-designed into products, processes, places and so on - what should we make of this transformation? Undertaking a radical examination of the disruptive effects of technology on the law and the legal mind-set, Roger Brownsword calls for a triple act of re-imagination: first, re-imagining legal rules as one element of a larger regulatory environment of which technological management is also a part; secondly, re-imagining the Rule of Law as a constraint on the arbitrary exercise of power (whether exercised through rules or through technological measures); and, thirdly, re-imagining the future of traditional rules of criminal law, tort law, and contract law.

On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law, by Philippa Strum (University Press of Kansas, 2022)

Drawing on interviews with RBG herself and those who knew her, as well as extensive knowledge of the cases themselves, Philippa Strum has provided a legal history of Ginsburg’s landmark litigation on behalf of women’s rights and gender equality. Those cases changed the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and, along with two Supreme Court cases of the 1980s and 1990s (Mississippi v. Hogan and U.S. v. Virginia), remain the foundation of constitutional gender jurisprudence today. On Account of Sex shows why RBG became the rock star of the legal world and gives readers an accessible guide to these widely forgotten but momentous decisions.

Research Handbook on Law and Technology, edited by Bartosz Brożek, Olia Kanevskaia, and Przemysław Pałka (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023)

This thorough and incisive Research Handbook reconstructs the scholarly discourses surrounding the field of law and technology, discussing the salient legal, governance and societal problems stemming from the use of different technologies, and how they should be treated under various legal frameworks.

The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit, by Jean-François Kervégan ; translated by Daniela Ginsburg and Martin Shuster (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

One of Hegel’s most controversial and confounding claims is that “the real is rational and the rational is real.” In this book, one of the world’s leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-François Kervégan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that claim, along the way delivering a compelling account of modern social, political, and ethical life.

The International Legal Order in the XXIst Century: Essays in Honour of Professor Marcelo Gustavo Kohen, edited by Jorge E. Viñuales, Andrew Clapham, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, and Mamadou Hébié (Brill Nijhoff, 2023)

This collection of essays celebrating the work of Professor Marcelo Kohen brings together the leading scholars and practitioners of public international law from different continents and generations to explore some of the most challenging issues of contemporary international law. The volume is a testimony of esteem and friendship from colleagues and former students, and it covers a vast expanse, reflecting the width and diversity of Professor Kohen’s own contribution. Written in English, French and Spanish, the essays in this volume will appeal to a broad public of academics, practitioners and students of international law from around the world.

The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better, by  Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie (University of Toronto Press, 2023)

Law today is incomplete, inaccessible, unclear, underdeveloped, and often perplexing to those whom it affects. In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

All of these ebooks are available to current University of Cambridge staff and students with a Raven password. A full list of ebook platforms can be viewed via the ebooks@cambridge LibGuide.