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When the State Kills
Is capital punishment just? Does it deter people from murder? What is the risk that we will execute innocent people? These are the usual questions at the heart of the increasingly heated debate about capital punishment in America. In this bold and impassioned book, Austin Sarat seeks to change the terms of that debate. Capital punishment must be stopped, Sarat argues, because it undermines our democratic society. Sarat unflinchingly exposes us to the realities of state killing. He examines its foundations in ideas about revenge and retribution. He takes us inside the courtroom of a capital trial, interviews jurors and lawyers who make decisions about life and death, and assesses the argument...
The Death Penalty on the Ballot
Investigating the attitudes about capital punishment in contemporary America, this book poses the question: can ending the death penalty be done democratically? How is it that a liberal democracy like the United States shares the distinction of being a leading proponent of the death penalty with some of the world's most repressive regimes? Reporting on the first study of initiative and referendum processes used to decide the fate of the death penalty in the United States, this book explains how these processes have played an important, but generally neglected, role in the recent history of America's death penalty. While numerous scholars have argued that the death penalty is incompatible with democracy and that it cannot be reconciled with democracy's underlying commitment to respect the equal dignity of all, Professor Austin Sarat offers the first study of what happens when the public gets to decide on the fate of capital punishment.
Mercy on Trial
On January 11, 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan--a Republican on record as saying that "some crimes are so horrendous . . . that society has a right to demand the ultimate penalty"--commuted the capital sentences of all 167 prisoners on his state's death row. Critics demonized Ryan. For opponents of capital punishment, however, Ryan became an instant hero whose decision was seen as a signal moment in the "new abolitionist" politics to end killing by the state. In this compelling and timely work, Austin Sarat provides the first book-length work on executive clemency. He turns our focus from questions of guilt and innocence to the very meaning of mercy. Starting from Ryan's controversial de...
Speech and Silence in American Law
Rather than abstract philosophical discussion or yet another analysis of legal doctrine, Speech and Silence in American Law seeks to situate speech and silence, locating them in particular circumstances and contexts and asking how context matters in facilitating speech or demanding silence. To understand speech and silence we have to inquire into their social life and examine the occasions and practices that call them forth and that give them meaning. Among the questions addressed in this book are: who is authorized to speak? And what are the conditions that should be attached to the speaking subject? Are there occasions that call for speech and others that demand silence? What is the relationship between the speech act and the speaker? Taking these questions into account helps readers understand what compels speakers and what problems accompany speech without a known speaker, allowing us to assess how silence speaks and how speech renders the silent more knowable.
Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice
Law punishes violence, yet law depends on violence. In this book, a group of leading interdisciplinary legal scholars seeks to map the inexorable but unstable relationship of law to violence. What does it mean to talk about the violence of law? Do high incarceration rates and increased reliance on capital punishment indicate that U.S. law is growing more violent at a time when violence is being restrained in other legal systems? How is the violence of law represented in popular culture and does this affect law's actual legitimacy? Does violence express or distort the essence of law? Does law's violence serve justice? In deeply original essays, the authors build on the seminal work of Robert ...
Sovereignty, Emergency, Legality
It is widely recognized that times of national emergency put legality to its greatest test. In such times we rely on sovereign power to rescue us, to hold the danger at bay. Yet that power can and often does threaten the values of legality itself. Sovereignty, Emergency, Legality examines law's complex relationship to sovereign power and emergency conditions. It puts today's responses to emergency in historical and institutional context, reminding readers of the continuities and discontinuities in the ways emergencies are framed and understood at different times and in different situations. And, in all this, it suggests the need to be less abstract in the way we discuss sovereignty, emergency, and legality. This book concentrates on officials and the choices they make in defining, anticipating, and responding to conditions of emergency as well as the impact of their choices on embodied subjects, whether citizen or stranger.
Law on the Screen
The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces--e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights--in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content--that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one--and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.
Law and the Sacred
"The essays in this book were originally prepared for ... during the 2001-2002 academic year."--Acknowledgments.
Law and War
Law and War explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war—a connection that has long vexed the jurisprudential imagination. Historically the term "war crime" struck some as redundant and others as oxymoronic: redundant because war itself is criminal; oxymoronic because war submits to no law. More recently, the remarkable trend toward the juridification of warfare has emerged, as law has sought to stretch its dominion over every aspect of the waging of armed struggle. No longer simply a tool for judging battlefield conduct, law now seeks to subdue warfare and to enlist it into the service of legal goals. Law has emerged as a f...
Cause Lawyers and Social Movements
Cause Lawyers and Social Movements seeks to reorient scholarship on cause lawyers, inviting scholars to think about cause lawyering from the perspective of those political activists with whom cause lawyers work and whom they seek to serve. It demonstrates that while all cause lawyering cuts against the grain of conventional understandings of legal practice and professionalism, social movement lawyering poses distinctively thorny problems. The editors and authors of this volume explore the following questions: What do cause lawyers do for, and to, social movements? How, when, and why do social movements turn to and use lawyers and legal strategies? Does their use of lawyers and legal strategies advance or constrain the achievement of their goals? And, how do movements shape the lawyers who serve them and how do lawyers shape the movements?
