UC Press Blog

July 30th is the UN-recognized World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, while January 11th is the US-recognized National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Both days center on bringing attention and education to the public about the issue of human trafficking. While these days are crucial for shining a spotlight on the problem, the conversation often stops short of deeper insights and solutions. Criminological theories can offer us the foundation and tools to do just that.

The debate over campus sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens inside Title IX offices. On the Wrong Side provides the first comprehensive account of the inner workings of the secretive Title IX system. Drawing on a yearlong study of survivors, perpetr

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy (the first original form of American popular music) and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept o

Practicing Asylum brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of violence in Latin America has grown in the last decade, scholars and attorneys have collaborat

By Meg Leta Jones and Amanda Levendowski, co-editors of Feminist CyberlawAfter the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many feared that America was returning to a time before Roe v. Wade. They were wrong. As Feminist Cyberlaw contributor Cynthia Conti-Cook cau

By Melissa Villa-Nicholas, author of Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry around ImmigrantsAround 2018, I started to read reports about increasing information technology surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border and around the U.S. to assist in immigration detention and deportat

By Ruben J. Garcia, author of Critical Wage Theory: Why Wage Justice Is Racial JusticeRaising the federal minimum wage is not a front burner issue in the U.S. presidential election campaign. Other important issues such as the war in Gaza, the trials of former President Donald Trump, or the futur

By Grace Howard, author of The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting PersonhoodWhen I say that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses are legal persons, many people may assume I’m talking about the recent opinion that stated embryos created in the cour

Gun Present takes us inside the everyday operations of the law at a courthouse in the Deep South. Illuminating the challenges accompanying the prosecution of criminal cases involving guns, the three coauthors—an anthropologist, a geographer, and a district attorney—present a deeply human portrait of

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the