A[a�?The notion . . . that miscarriages of justice are not simply idiosyncratic instances, but are rather part of the ordinary machinery of law, is a crucial insight, one that deserves this kind of book-length treatment.A[a�?
--James MaMartell, author of "Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat"

Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of our legal system.

The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both address the questions and point the way toward further discussion.

When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in thelawA[a�a[s ability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself. Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to begin to fix our broken legal system.

Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak, Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on political relationships, politics and legal reform, and law and the family. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

This special issue offers an academic analysis of the television series The Americans as a reflection of current social and political trends across the United States. Uncovering the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, authors consider how their performance challenges our ability to differentiate between the authentic family, the legitimate source of social reproduction, and the counterfeit one that disrupts the social order. Focusing on how television’s shift away from the traditional nuclear family is crucial to understanding the relatively rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage in mainstream politics, authors invite consideration and acceptance of alternative family forms that are often represented within LGBTQ communities. Pairing the series with scholarship on criminal law, contributors also delve into how The Americans provides an opportunity to reconsider the significance of the “pro-family� label to New Right organizing, the importance of mothering to this narrative, and the relationship between this account of mothering and democratic citizenship more broadly. Drawing on the concept of legal consciousness to examine the relationship between identity and hegemony, chapters also consider how the enactment of legal beliefs and values help individuals to form identities, as well as how these are constrained by popular ideology. Interpreting this television series through a socially charged lens, Law, Politics and Family in ‘The Americans’ offers a compelling insight into the legal and cultural undertones of family dynamics, as well as those at the heart of conservative American politics.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aExpertly dissects the racist underpinnings of capital punishment while pushing some intellectual boundaries.a
--"International Socialist Review"

aThe authors give the nation an unflinching view of the shameful influence of racism in death penalty cases. This is a must read for anyone who cares about fairness in application of the death penalty and respect for the rule of law in our modern society.a
--Senator Edward M. Kennedy

aOgeltree and Sarat combine the most severe criminal punishment with the bugaboo of racial class and prejudice in their book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State. The professors astutely note that the death penalty is often used as a club to keep poor and desperate minorities in line in the larger white society.a
--"Black Issues Book Review"

aAn elegant compendium of essays written by sociologists, historians, criminologists, and lawyers. The essays starkly reveal how this countryas death penalty has its roots in lynchings, and how it operates to sustain a racist agenda.a
--"The Federal Lawyer"

"This book offers thoughtful and wide-ranging assessments of how America's most dramatic punishment intersects with America's deepest and most divisive social problem. These essays go far beyond the obvious and offer much of interest both for those with a particular interest in the death penalty and for those who seek to understand and to ameliorate our country's shameful legacy of racial inequality. This is the rare book that will be helpful to the student, the scholar, and the activist alike."
--Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School

"Essential reading for all who are seeking to understand thecontemporary American death penalty or to imagine an America without one."
--Jonathan Simon, School of Law-Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley

"A major contribution."
--Randy A. Hertz, NYU School of Law

"Riveting and very timely. Remarkably, the book creatively assembles social history, demographic and statistical analysis, experimental psychology, and legal history and finds a common truth: the death penalty may be one of the most persistent, self-reinforcing ways we uphold racial division."
--Robert Weisberg, Stanford University Law School

"The book is bound to influence the thinking of many who tolerate if not actively support the death penalty because of the way it shows how deeply entrenched are the shameful racist attitudes and practices in our nation's dominant (white) culture."
--Hugo Adam Bedau, editor of "The Death Penalty in America"

"This is the first recent volume to address race and capital punishment in such a broad, systematic, and--perhaps most importantly--multi-disciplinary fashion."
--David R. Dow, University of Houston Law Center

Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment.

In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essaysapproach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment.

From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.

This volume presents articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars spanning the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on political relationships, politics and legal reform, and law and the family.

This volume is part of an annually-published series of interdisciplinary research on law, with a critical focus. Research is invited on a wide range of law-related subjects, including law and inequality, feminist jurisprudence, racial oppression and law, and legal institutions and communities.

With a history marked by incompetence, political maneuvering, and secrecy, America's "most humane" execution method is anything but. From the beginning of the Republic, this country has struggled to reconcile its use of capital punishment with the Constitution's prohibition of cruel punishment. Death penalty proponents argue both that it is justifiable as a response to particularly heinous crimes, and that it serves to deter others from committing them in the future. However, since the earliest executions, abolitionists have fought against this state-sanctioned killing, arguing, among other things, that the methods of execution have frequently been just as gruesome as the crimes meriting their use. Lethal injection was first introduced in order to quell such objections, but, as Austin Sarat shows in this brief history, its supporters' commitment to painless and humane death has never been certain. This book tells the story of lethal injection's earliest iterations in the United States, starting with New York state's rejection of that execution method almost a century and half ago. Sarat recounts lethal injection's return in the late 1970s, and offers novel and insightful scrutiny of the new drug protocols that went into effect between 2010 and 2020. Drawing on rare data, he makes the case that lethal injections during this time only became more unreliable, inefficient, and more frequently botched. Beyond his stirring narrative history, Sarat mounts a comprehensive condemnation of the state-level maneuvering in response to such mishaps, whereby death penalty states adopted secrecy statutes and adjusted their execution protocols to make it harder to identify and observe lethal injection's flaws. What was once touted as America's most humane execution method is now its most unreliable one. What was once a model of efficiency in the grim business of state killing is now marked by mayhem. The book concludes by critically examining the place of lethal injection, and the death penalty writ large, today.

The book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states. The contributors to this book demonstrate that states of violence thus have a history and sociology. Yet wherever the state acts violently, the legitimacy of its acts must be engaged with the real facts of war, capital punishment, and the ugly realities of death. This book calls into question the legitimacy of state uses of violence and mounts a sustained effort at interpretation, sense making, and critique. It suggests that condemning the state s decisions to use lethal force is not a simple matter of abolishing the death penalty or to take another exemplary example of the killing state demanding that the state engage only in just (publicly declared and justified) wars, pointing out that even such overt instances of lethal force are more elusive as targets of critique than one might think. Indeed, altering such decisions may do little to change the essential relationship of the state to violence. To change that relationship we must also attend to the violent state as a state of mind, a state of mind that is not just a social or psychological condition but also a moral commitment and/or a philosophical position.

Half a century after the beginning of the second wave, feminist legal theorists are still writing about many of the subjects they addressed early on: money, sex, reproduction, and jobs. What has changed is the way that they talk about these subjects. Specifically, these theorists now posit a more complex and nuanced conception of power. Recent scholarship recognizes the complexities of power in contemporary society, the ways in which these complexities entrench sex inequality, and the role that law can play in reducing inequality and increasing agency. The feminist legal theorists in this volume are emblematic of this effort. They carefully examine the relationship between gender, equality, and power across an array of realms: sex, reproduction, pleasure, work, money. In doing so they identify social, political, economic, developmental, and psychological and somatic forces, operating both internally and externally, that complicate the expression and constraint of power. Finally, they give sophisticated thought to the possibilities for legal interventions in light of these more complex notions of power.

This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society focuses on the issue of copyright. The papers contain critical analysis and investigation into existing copyright law and provide insight for policymakers and commentators. The papers contain a range of analyses on issues of copyright. Highlights of the volume include the an examination of three difference aspects of the 1976 Copyright Act, focusing on fair use, statutory damage and formalities; an interesting analysis of the distinction between authentic and 'inauthentic' drawing on the examples of authenticated artwork and counterfeit luxury goods; and an everyday narrative of copyright by examining the laymen understanding of the term, based on comments sections of websites where users post their reactions to copyright-related stories.

"The articles in this volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society cover an exciting and diverse range of topics relating to law's relationship with and impact on society. Two articles cover immigration, but from very different perspectives. One examines the legal-cultural attitude of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel while the other investigates US Immigration Policy and the notion of 'child saving'. Other articles cover the institutional dynamics of same-sex marriage debates in America; the anti-strip mining movement in central Appalachia; an analysis of the death penalty in Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the most active death penalty locales in the contemporary U.S; and affirmative defenses at the International Criminal Court."

This volume presents articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars spanning the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on political relationships, politics and legal reform, and law and the family.

This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics and Society focuses on law and the liberal state; presenting an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to analysis of law and liberty. The first chapters focus on law's direct relationship with the American liberal state. John P. Anderson defends John Rawl's pragmatism; Adelaide Villmoare and Peter Stillman consider the 'Janus faces of law', a double vision of law where both sides of the face adhere to one another through neoliberalism; and Timothy Delaune examines jury nullification. The remaining chapters then go on to consider specific applications of the law within society. Susan Burgess provides a critical account of what implications the inclusion of gays in the US military has for understanding the means by which the liberal state uses law to include the previously excluded. Daniel Skinner then problematizes the body politics of American liberalism, as viewed through the lens of health policy and the final chapter from Beau Breslin and Katherine Cavanaugh explores how various legal and judicial policies have highlighted the clash between the state's imperial authority and Native American narratives.

In The Beautiful Prison incarcerated Americans and prison critics seek to imagine the prison as something better than a machinery of suffering. From personal testimony to theoretical meditation these writers explore and confront the practical and cultural limits the prison places on its transformation into a socially constructive institution. Long-term prisoner Kenneth E. Hartman engages the reader in his struggle to find beauty inside the increasingly bleak and sterile confines of the California Department of Corrections. Chuck Jackson releases his imagination on Houston's notorious Harris County Jail to envision a jailhouse transformed into a university, community, and arts center. Between the grip of the CDC and utopian vision, Leder, Ginsburg, Pinkert, and Brown report on their practical and theoretical work to understand what the prison has been and might be. The Beautiful Prison suggests that any passage from 'ugly prisons' into institutions serving the greater good will only be possible when the will and intellectual capital of their inhabitants are met by free-world critics ready to challenge assumptions of the prison acting solely as an apparatus of punishment.

This special volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" takes up a subject of an enormous import for law and legal scholarship, Guilt. At the center of our belief in law is the hope and expectation that law can differentiate the guilty from the innocent. But as the articles in this volume show law's relationship to guilt is more complex and vexed than that. Law constitutes us as guilty subjects and law itself is a guilty subject. The articles in this volume explore law's guilt about literature, various domains in which bodies of guilt appear, and historical perspectives on the subject of guilt. Taken together they exemplify the way interdisciplinary scholarship opens up new questions and new avenues of inquiry about the social and cultural life of law.

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society brings together the work of scholars of several different generations and several different national contexts. The articles published here feature both cutting edge issues of major interest to policy makers and activists as well as those that address venerable issues in the interdisciplinary study of law. They illuminate family law, the way law deals with children, international human rights, and the way law deals with injury and damages claims.

If catastrophes are, by definition, exceptional events of such magnitude that worlds and lives are dramatically overturned, the question of timing would pose a seemingly straightforward, if not redundant question. The Time of Catastrophe demonstrates the analytic productiveness of this question, arguing that there is much to be gained by interrogating the temporal conceits of conventional understandings of catastrophe and the catastrophic. Bringing together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars, the book develops a critical language for examining 'catastrophic time', recognizing the central importance of, and offering a set of frameworks for, examining the alluring and elusive qualities of catastrophe. Framed around the ideas of Agamben, Kant and Benjamin, and drawing on philosophy, history, law, political science, anthropology and the arts, this volume seeks to demonstrate how the question of 'catastrophic time' is in fact a question about something much more than the frequency of disasters in our so-called 'Age of Catastrophe'.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and law. Their work examines the complex intersections of sovereignty, legality, and power, the relationship between legal theory and critique, and the way identity politics shapes public policy. The articles published here illuminate some of the exciting and innovative work being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and the law. Those scholars examine the nature of family and the intersection of family and law, the way contexts shape legal actors, and the nature of rights and resistance. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a unique special issue "Is the Death Penalty Dying?." Drawing together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law, this volume provides a comprehensive assessment of the status of the death penalty in the United States, its past, and its trajectory for the future. Taken together, the work published in this volume exemplifies the kind exciting and innovative work now being done by legal scholars from different disciplines.This is a special issue examining the death penalty in the US. It draws together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" includes a special collection of chapters entitled "Making Sense of the Past: When History Meets Law." The articles in this symposium consider the ways in which history has shaped law and how we make sense of past events. In addition, the volume contains general articles that explore pressing legal issues such as the prison boom, First Amendment controversies, and the work of cause lawyers. As has long been the tradition with this series, Volume 53 illustrates the vibrancy of interdisciplinary legal scholarship throughout.

DESCRIPTION: This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on the relationship of law and values and race and the law. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship. TABLE OF CONTENTS: List of contributors; Law and Values: Interpretive freedom and divine law: early rabbinic renderings of divine justice (C. Halberstam); Rawls' law of peoples: an expansion of the prioritization of political over religious values (E. Carpenter); Post modernity and the fading of individual responsibility (J. Krapp); Race in Law; Passing phantasms/sanctioning perfomativities: (re)reading white masculinity in Rhinelander v. Rhine lander (N. Hers); Tortious race, race torts: hate speech, intentional infliction, and the problem of harm (P.L. Rivers); Before or against the law? Citizens' legal beliefs and experiences as death penalty jurors (B. Steiner).

Large law firms have become a dominant feature of the legal landscape in the United States and elsewhere. This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society examines the situation of large law firms. The articles collected here address the following questions: How has the large law firm altered, or adapted to, the ideals/ideology of the legal profession? How do law firms function as organizations? What happens to firms when they globalize their practices? What is the situation of scholarship on large law firms? Has the firm been incorporated into boarder interdisciplinary configurations? What, if any, new paradigms of study of firms are on the horizon?

This volume presents articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars spanning the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on political relationships, politics and legal reform, and law and the family.

Beginning with an overview of the history and philosophy of punishment, these articles explore penal practices in the modern state and the deeper philosophical and social aspects of retributive justice.