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Hugo Bedau has commanded a long and distinguished career as one of the most widely respected opponents of capital punishment. His work has addressed a variety of perspectives in the death penalty debate, from execution of the innocent to the philosophical and moral grounds for abolition. Now his essays from the last fifteen years appear together in one volume. More than simply a collection of previously published articles, Killing as Punishment represents a unified, interdisciplinary inquiry into several of the major empirical and normative issues raised by the death penalty. The essays have been revised and updated to survey the current state of the death penalty against the background of the past half-century, and are divided along two major axes: one detailing a range of facts raised by the controversy over capital punishment, the other presenting a critical evaluation of the subject from a constitutional and ethical point of view. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the field, Bedau addresses topics that include strong public support for the death penalty, wrongful convictions in capital cases, the disappearance of executive clemency, constitutional arguments surrounding t
Early textual source of the vast body of Dharmasastra literature of India on religion, law, and morality contain numerous statements that present or imply an undefined conception of punishment. Yet nowhere is this conception formally defined, as if knowledge of its nature and structure were generally known. In this “first-ever” attempt to provide a definition of the conception and to recover its ideational infrastructure, the author has drawn on these sources to reconstruct the theoretical backgrounds of its distinctive metaphysical, religious, juridical, social, and moral components. He shows that the conception is “the totality of correction principles, powers, agents, processes, and operations through which acts contrary to the Universal Order are counteracted and compensated.” The volume contains extensive documentation, a glossary of Sanskrit terms, a selected bibliography, and an index.
Roots of the Republic shows how the Constitution was a product, not simply of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of a legal and philosophical tradition almost two centuries old. The editors have selected eighteen key documents in the development of that tradition and reproduced them with essays that explain what they mean, why they were written, and why they are important today. Each key document is accompanied by an interpretive essay written by a contemporary scholar. These essays focus on the importance of each frame of government and include commentaries on why they are meaningful today. Intended to help readers learn how to read and understand these documents, the book is also a handy reference and a strong introduction to the development of political thought and the debates surrounding the formation of the state governments and the federal union.
This indispensable history of the Eighth Amendment and the founders' views of capital punishment is also a passionate call for the abolition of the death penalty based on the notion of cruel and unusual punishment
The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adult...
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The ABA Journal serves the legal profession. Qualified recipients are lawyers and judges, law students, law librarians and associate members of the American Bar Association.
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Fourteen individual state essays elucidate the complexitites of local and regional interests that shaped the debate over individual rights and the eventual adoption of the Bill of Rights.