From Thrillers to Treatises: The Year in Alumni Books

“Pro-Arbitration” Revisited: A Tribute to Professor George Bermann From His Students Over the Years
Juris Publishing, April 2023

Four recent LL.M. graduates and a lecturer in law commissioned 107 essays by colleagues and former students to honor George A. Bermann, Walter Gellhorn Professor of Law and Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law, who has taught at Columbia Law School for nearly 50 years. The book was inspired by one of Bermann’s seminal articles, which argues, perhaps counterintuitively, that the most arbitration-friendly policies might actually involve trade-offs that fail to advance a narrowly interpreted pro-arbitration agenda. Read more.

Loveboat Forever
HarperTeen, November 2023

In this companion to Abigail Hing Wen’s best-selling YA novels—Loveboat, Taipei (which was turned into the film Love in Taipei) and Loveboat Reunion—23-year-old classical musician Pearl Wong needs to rebuild her shattered reputation after a social media catastrophe. She returns to the elite cultural immersion program in Taipei (aptly nicknamed “Loveboat”) and has a life-altering summer.

It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On
Algonquin Books, October 2023

A senior news and politics editor at Essence, Malaika Jabali has written a saucy primer on capitalism, socialism, and colonialism. “The book’s most compelling feature is Jabali’s focus on nonwhite and non-Western socialist theorists and leaders,” said Kirkus Reviews, which called It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism “a radical textbook for budding socialists, uncompromising in its attention to race in the story of global capitalism.”

The Fourth Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Policing
University of Michigan Press, August 2023

Police are required to obey the law, but according to Michael J.Z. Mannheimer, a professor at Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law, courts have lost track of that requirement due to misinterpreting the two constitutional provisions governing police conduct: the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The courts’ misinterpretation of these provisions, he contends in the book, has led them to hold federal and state law enforcement mistakenly to the same constitutional standards.

The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill
Flatiron Books, January 2023

Brad Meltzer is a New York Times best-selling author many times over; his latest, The Nazi Conspiracy, is a compelling history of the 1943 Tehran Conference, which brought together the leaders of Britain, Russia, and the United States and changed the course of World War II. “It’s a true page-turner from beginning to end,” wrote a reviewer for Bookreporter.

Investment Crowdfunding
Oxford University Press, June 2023

In his comprehensive guide to the emerging online marketplace for entrepreneurial capital, Andrew A. Schwartz marries theory with a decade of on-the-ground research. Schwartz, a professor at University of Colorado Law School, provides lawyers, students, scholars, and policymakers with everything they need to know about investment crowdfunding, its regulation, and how to improve it.

The Last Election
Akashic Books, September 2023

What would happen if a third-party presidential candidate upended the election so that no candidate won a majority of votes in the Electoral College? Informed by Andrew Yang’s own experience running in the Democratic primaries in 2020, this fictional thriller includes the assassination of a female Supreme Court justice and a Michigan state senator. Kirkus Reviews called it “a corrosive work of speculative fiction that may put readers even more on edge than they already are.”