Search results for ""author austin sarat""

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" features a symposium on law and film as well as two articles of general interest. It brings together the work of scholars from several disciplines, work which usefully illuminates central questions in the operation of law and legal systems. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

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This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society brings together an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars to explore issues on the cutting edge of socio-legal research. They consider the complex connections of liberal democracy, human rights, governance in and through courts, the challenges terrorism poses to criminal law, and the problematics of global governance. Taken together, the chapters in this volume point to exciting new directions for legal scholars.

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This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society considers the crucial role played by intermediaries, such as companies and lawyers, in the legal system.In this special issue, scholars from different disciplines find that, in some instances, legal intermediation can succeed in fulfilling the initial goals of regulation. However, in re-evaluating the role of the legal devices that organizations set up to comply with regulation, this volume also illustrates their diverse impact on legality and legal consciousness in organizations and in economic life.With a broad range of case studies covering anti-discrimination law, financial rules, competition law, labour law and health and safety procedures, this European-focused volume makes an important contribution to the scholarship in this field.

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This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society brings together an international spread of legal scholars, presenting a varied collection of chapters. Chapters include: child abduction during the military dictatorship in Argentina; a novel approach to empirical research on legal framing from the University of California, Berkeley; the role of silence in law and film from Israel; a chapter from Sweden on the use of video in the court of appeal; and finally two chapters on the supreme court in the USA, one looking at influences through social capital on supreme court decision makers and the second looking at the self-perception and public perception of the supreme court.

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How have prospects for abolishing the death penalty changed since the 1972 Supreme Court decision, Furman v Georgia? The editor and contributors to Death Penalty in Decline? assess the contemporary death penalty landscape and look at the trends in and attitudes toward capital punishment and its abolition. They highlight factors that are propelling alternatives to the death penalty as well as the obstacles to ending it. At a time when the United States is undertaking an unprecedented national reconsideration of the death penalty, Death Penalty in Decline? seeks to evaluate how abolitionists might succeed today. Contributors: John Bessler, Corinna Barrett Lain, James R. Martel, Linda Ross Meyer, Carol S. Steiker, Jordan M. Steiker, and the editor

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a unique special issue "Constitutional Politics in a Conservative Era". This issue brings together the work of leading scholars of Constitutionalism, Constitutional law, and politics in the United States to take stock of the field to chart its progress, and point the way for its future development. Much of the way Americans have thought about Constitutional law has, until recently, been dominated by models developed during the Warren Court Era. Today, however, scholars seek new approaches, approaches that do not take for granted liberal hegemony in the courts. Among these, theories of popular constitutionalism and judicial minimalism appear to be increasingly popular. How should Scholars think about American courts in an era of conservative domination of the judiciary? What should/will constitutional politics in the United States look like over the next decade?

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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 arguments swirling around Timothy McVeigh and his trial for the bombing in Oklahoma City. Aided by a series of unsettling color photographs, he traces Americans' evolving quest for new methods of execution, and explores the place of capital punishment in popular culture by examining such films as Dead Man Walking, The Last Dance, and The Green Mile. Sarat argues that state executions, once used by monarchs as symbolic displays of power, gained acceptance among Americans as a sign of the people's sovereignty. Yet today when the state kills, it does so in a bureaucratic procedure hidden from view and for which no one in particular takes responsibility. He uncovers the forces that sustain America's killing culture, including overheated political rhetoric, racial prejudice, and the desire for a world without moral ambiguity. Capital punishment, Sarat shows, ultimately leaves Americans more divided, hostile, indifferent to life's complexities, and much further from solving the nation's ills. In short, it leaves us with an impoverished democracy. The book's powerful and sobering conclusions point to a new abolitionist politics, in which capital punishment should be banned not only on ethical grounds but also for what it does to Americans and what we cherish.

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" contains a Special Issue on crime and criminal justice. It brings together the work of scholars whose work usefully illuminates central questions in about how we define and process those who violate the criminal law and about the technologies of policing and punishment. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

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This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society examines how law understands the past. Topics covered include the use of legal language to dehumanize slaves in the eighteenth century, the use of history by lawyers and judges to justify existing law or make changes to the law during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a study of deportation in the context of the evolution of civil rights and civil liberties in the United States, and a re-examination of the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v Oregon in 1908. Through its valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between law and history, this special issue is essential reading for legal scholars worldwide.

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Studies in Law, Politics, and Society provides a vehicle for the publication of scholarly articles within the broad parameters of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. In this latest edition of this highly successful research series, chapters examine a diverse range of legal issues and their impact on and intersections with society. This volume focusses on Law and the Imagining of Difference with each chapter examining how law responds to the claims of difference, how and when it recognizes difference and accommodates it, as well as when and why such recognition and accommodation is resisted. Topics covered include disability, same-sex marriage and gender equality. This volume brings together leading scholars and will be vital reading for all those researching in this subject area.

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Studies in Law, Politics, and Society provides a vehicle for the publication of scholarly articles within the broad parameters of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. In this latest edition of this highly successful research series, articles examine a diverse range of legal issues and their impact on and intersections with society. Topics covered include: marriage equality and the demise of civil unions; the LGBTQ community in the 1980s; the landscape of choice regarding reproductive rights and vaccine refusal; the rights of unvaccinated children; a socio-legal framework for understanding the social control of pleasure; and a data re-use and its impact on group identity. This volume brings together leading scholars and will be vital reading for all those researching in this subject area.

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Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (SLPS) provides a vehicle for the publication of scholarly articles within the broad parameters of interdisciplinary legal scholarship; the articles in this volume cover a diverse range of topics relating to law's relationship with and impact on society. Topics covered include: coverage of capital punishment in the mainstream and radical press; the landmark Roe vs. Wade case and the Republican Party's relationship with abortion law; an exploration of the legal politics of temporality in emergencies; gendered racialization and White supremacy in the US, specifically related to Muslim women; conflict resolution and legal theory; and self-determination for indigenous peoples in the Pacific.

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"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."

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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.

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This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society focuses on the discourse of judging and the "language of judging" within many diverse legal scenarios. The volume features chapters specifically on: the "language of rights" within the context of abortion and same-sex marriage cases; discourses within the European Court of Justice; the modern-day place of politics in the US Supreme Court; and discussions on the two-court crisis which lead to the US Constitutional Convention of 1849. The chapters question the complex and conflicting relationship between politics and the law, understanding judicial independence, and offer an analysis of how the literary narrative of law plays a significant part in the delivery of legal judgement.

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Volume 56 of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents the latest scholarship on human rights. The work contained in this volume examines both the theoretical dimensions and dilemmas of human rights in the modern world and particular cases in which the problems and possibilities of human rights are examined. Taken together the contributions point to a need for more searching examination of the way human rights work and highlight the contribution of human rights to the advancement of claims for justice. "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" is a leading socio-legal publication that truly embraces innovative, theoretically informed, interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

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Gruesome Spectacles tells the sobering history of botched, mismanaged, and painful executions in the U.S. from 1890 to the present. Since the book's initial publication in 2014, the cruel and unusual executions of a number of people on death row, including Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma and Joseph Wood in Arizona, have made headlines and renewed vigorous debate surrounding the death penalty in America. Austin Sarat's book instantly became an essential resource for citizens, scholars, and lawmakers interested in capital punishment—even the Supreme Court, which cited the book in its recent opinion, Glossip v. Gross. Now in paperback, the book includes a new preface outlining the latest twists and turns in the death penalty debate, including the recent galvanization of citizens and leaders alike as recent botched executions have unfolded in the press. Sarat argues that unlike in the past, today's botched executions seem less like inexplicable mishaps and more like the latest symptoms of a death penalty machinery in disarray. Gruesome Spectacles traces the historical evolution of methods of execution, from hanging or firing squad to electrocution to gas and lethal injection. Even though each of these technologies was developed to "perfect" state killing by decreasing the chance of a cruel death, an estimated three percent of all American executions went awry in one way or another. Sarat recounts the gripping and truly gruesome stories of some of these deaths—stories obscured by history and to some extent, the popular press.

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The purpose of this special issue of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" is to examine the situation of law and literature. Once hailed as a promising new way to think about law and as opening a vital conversation about literature the question today is whether the law and literature enterprise has lived up to its initial promise. Has it succeeded in establishing a new interdiscipinarity or lost energy as law and literature courses become part of the mainstream both in legal and literary studies? Has the study of law and literature given way or been incorporated into boarder interdisciplinary configurations? What, if any, new paradigms of literary study of legal phenomena are on the horizon?This is a contemporary study of law and literature. It includes contributions by an international group of leading scholars.

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"Studies in Law, Politics and Society" continues the tradition of annually publishing interdisciplinary research on law with a critical focus that was begun in Research in Law and Sociology and carried forward in Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control. The new title describes an expanded focus and a broader audience of legal scholars who study: the intersection of legal thought and consciousness and the development of legal practices and institutions; and the development of legal thought and practices. The research spans a wide range of law related subjects including law and inequality, feminist jurisprudence, racial oppression and law, legal institutions and communities, and the ways law is used by political authorities or by ordinary citizens. Legal scholarship produced from an historical, comparative or ethnographic perspective is of special interest. This book series is available electronically online.

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Their work covers political science, policy studies, and law. Some of the articles published in this issue focus on the sources of conflict and violence as well as law's response to both. Here, research illustrates the complex ways law can be said to be both opposed to violence and yet be violent itself. Other articles focus on the way judges and other legal actors use law as they interpret it. Taken together they exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship. An interdisciplinary volume that discusses political science, policy science and law, this book is divided into two parts: conflict, violence, and legal processes; and deciding cases, charting progress. It uses case law examples to examine issues.

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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).

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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 Cover--one of the few legal scholars ever to consider the question of law and violence. In striving to situate his insights within current political, social, economic, and cultural contexts, they contemplate diverse and interrelated subjects surrounding the theme of law and violence. Among these are the purpose of law as punishment, the increasing number of executions in the United States, prison violence, racial disparity in sentencing, and the meaning of torture. The result is a remarkable volume that stimulates us to reconsider connections that we too often leave unexplored. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Marianne Constable, Peter Fitzpatrick, Thomas R. Kearns, Peter Rush, Jonathan Simon, Shaun McVeigh, and Alison Young.

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This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society brings together research by graduate students from universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. The work of these students was singled out by their teachers and advisors as showing unusual promise and marking out directions for the next generation of interdisciplinary legal scholars. The research collected here is often comparative. It is theoretically informed and rigorous in its methods. Taken together it shows breadth and excellence, and it signals the continuing vibrancy of interdisciplinary legal studies.

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" brings together research on law's cultural life and on institutions and actors who translate interests, preferences, and values into legal policy. It offers perspectives from an interdisciplinary and international community and contains contributions from scholars of theology, political science, criminology, bio-ethics, and law in the United States, Israel, and Canada.

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Rights and rights talk have a long and storied history and have occupied a crucial place in the ideology of liberal legalism. With the development of Critical Legal Studies in the 1970s and 80s, rights were subject to extensive critique. Yet not long after that critique rights were rehabilitated by feminists and Critical Race Theorists. Today, scholars are investigating the role of rights in social movements, in legal consciousness, in organizations, in the international arena, etc. This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" contains a Special Issue on rights. It brings together the work of leading scholars to think about the nature, utility and limits of rights. This work takes stock of the field, charts its progress and points the way for its future development.

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This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society examines the contribution of ethnography to our understanding of contemporary legal and political phenomena, with a particular focus on how it enables us to make sense of modern life under conditions of post-colonialism and globalization. Through the examination of case studies such as affirmative action at the University of Michigan, the US government and tribal consultations, the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, and freedom of speech on campus, this edited volume demonstrates the value of ethnography as a method of scholarly investigation within law and politics. Written by an impressive group of interdisciplinary scholars, this book will prove invaluable to students and researchers in the fields of law and politics.

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This special issue is part two of a two-part edited collection on interrupting the legal person, and what this means. Should we think of the legal person as a technical and grammatical question that varies across different legal traditions and jurisdictions? Does this cut across different ways of living and speaking law? The chapters in this volume interrogate the role of the person and personhood in different contexts, jurisdictions, and legal traditions. This volume is an appealing read for anyone interested in rich contemporary conversations around legal personhood, and in interrupting and interrogating assumptions which we may take for granted.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society is dedicated to the life and work of beloved legal scholar Stuart Scheingold. The articles brought together in this volume articulate the inspiring contribution Scheingold made to political science and law and society. The final chapter "Rights, Community, and Democracy: A Socio-Legal Critique of the Neoconservative Case against Rights" is a work authored by Stuart Scheingold which has been completed by his co-author and is published here for the first time. This volume shows how Scheingold helped to bridge the differences between how rights are expressed within the law, and how they are actually put into practice. Centering on the theme of "the myth of rights" the chapters discuss diverse aspects of society, crime, politics, and law; most specifically street crime, immigration and crime control policies, political criminology and urban social control, race and "displaced anxiety" within communities in the US, and animal rights.

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" contains an international and interdisciplinary array of legal scholarship. Presenting diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, this work illuminates the law's response to its social context as well as the way law shapes that context. It shows how legal scholars contribute to public debate about contemporary issues as well as how they articulate the nature of rights and the limits of law.

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This volume Studies in Law, Politics and Society contains a symposium on indigenous peoples in Latin America. It examines the ways rights are negotiated between those groups and the states in which they live. The articles in the symposium show the different ways the complex politics of rights play out in Latin American nations. They ask us to consider the way context is reflected in the political and legal life of indigenous peoples, and they consider various theoretical paradigms for understanding rights.

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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.

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a diverse array of interdisciplinary research. It contains articles by scholars from political science, sociology, and law. These articles examine the legal treatment of 'suspect' populations, the work of legal actors, and the works of various legal devices. 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 book contains contributions from law and society scholars from political science, anthropology, sociology, and law and a comprehensive assessment of the state-of-the-field, its past, and its trajectory for the future.

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This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Their work covers several social science disciplines as well as law. Some of the articles published in this issue examine the interactions of law and "vulnerable" populations. Here research illustrates the complex ways law can be used by those groups, as well as the impact of law on their lives. Other articles focus on indigenous groups and particular legal controversies in which they are involved. Taken together they exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

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This special issue is the second of a two-part edited collection on the privatisation of migration. The central thrust of the special issue is a critical analysis of modern day manifestations of private participation in immigration control such as through companies which run detention and deportation programmes and individual landlords, medical professionals and employers who become part of immigration enforcement. In the chapters the authors examine the role of private stakeholders and the political economy in migration control.

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This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society brings together an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars to explore issues around citizenship and the law. Topics covered include the constitutive nature of citizenship laws and the often complex and unsettled evolutionary journeys such laws take, how undocumented migrants in the United States have coped with being 'unlawful', the close connection between immigration enforcement and citizenship rights in the United States, a sociological and historical reconstruction of the emergence of citizenship as a source of legitimacy for political institutions, and a study of the expressive components of humanitarian activism in the context of immigration enforcement on the border between the United States and Mexico. Through its valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between law and citizenship, this volume is essential reading for legal scholars worldwide.

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Bringing a timely synthesis to the field, The Handbook of Law and Society presents a comprehensive overview of key research findings, theoretical developments, and methodological controversies in the field of law and society. Provides illuminating insights into societal issues that pose ongoing real-world legal problems Offers accessible, succinct overviews with in-depth coverage of each topic, including its evolution, current state, and directions for future research Addresses a wide range of emergent topics in law and society and revisits perennial questions about law in a global world including the widening gap between codified laws and “law in action”, problems in the implementation of legal decisions, law’s constitutive role in shaping society, the importance of law in everyday life, ways legal institutions both embrace and resist change, the impact of new media and technologies on law, intersections of law and identity, law’s relationship to social consensus and conflict, and many more Features contributions from 38 international expert scholars working in diverse fields at the intersections of legal studies and social sciences Unique in its contributions to this rapidly expanding and important new multi-disciplinary field of study

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This forty-fifth volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" brings together the work of scholars from several disciplines, work which usefully illuminates central questions surrounding the operation of law and legal systems. Their work offers new perspectives on sentencing and punishment, lawyering for the public good, and the meaning of legal doctrine. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.

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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.

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This special issue investigates the meaning of justice and dignity and how they have changed over time. What do we mean by human dignity? How do we understand and interpret that meaning? How has it evolved? Showcasing a selection of papers responding to this critical central question, the authors delve into issues such as the foundational roles of justice and dignity in practical philosophy and the idea that human dignity must be understood as the right to be recognized as a participant in the institutional practice of human and fundamental rights, analysing how this modern conception was incorporated into the practice of human rights after Auschwitz as a response to a crisis in the modern model of the practice of rights. Furthermore, the authors study examples of misinterpretation of the philosophical term and historical concept of human dignity in contemporary legal theory and practice alongside Kant’s notion of human dignity, that is understood as a novel ‘care of the self’. Self-violation of dignity and the exposure to violation by others – thoughtlessly or intentionally – gives way to an exploration of the language of anti-violence activists, university coordinators, and due process activists concerned with Title IX and campus sexual violence. Providing a comprehensive look at historic and contemporary meanings of human dignity, this edited collection is an appealing read for scholars interested in the intersection of dignity with philosophy, law, human rights, legal theory, social theory, and more.

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This special issue is part one of a two-part edited collection on interrupting the legal person, and what this means. Should we think of the legal person as a technical and grammatical question that varies across different legal traditions and jurisdictions? Does this cut across different ways of living and speaking law? The chapters in this volume interrogate the role of the person and personhood in different contexts, jurisdictions, and legal traditions. This volume is an appealing read for anyone interested in rich contemporary conversations around legal personhood, and in interrupting and interrogating assumptions which we may take for granted.

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Studies in Law, Politics, and Society provides a vehicle for the publication of scholarly articles within the broad parameters of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. In this latest edition of this highly successful research series, chapters examine a diverse range of legal issues and their impact on and intersections with society. This volume features a special section with papers dedicated to life after imprisonment. The chapters examine issues around offender rehabilitation, mass incarceration, and overcriminalization. Other papers included in this important volume address the shift in attitudes to solitary confinement (and the prospect of moving beyond solitary confinement measures) and private prison services. This volume brings together leading scholars and will be vital reading for all those researching in this subject area.

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This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society examines the relationship between law and disasters. The papers come from members of the Collaborative Research Network on the Jurisprudence of Disasters within the Law and Society Association. This network was formed in 2012 at a conference held by the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, titled "Workshop on Disasters and Sociolegal Studies." The volume addresses the 'myths' of contemporary disaster law and policy, such as that of society's "invincibility". The papers examine specific cases such as the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, bushfire management in Australia and wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean, as well as providing broader analysis and comment on global disaster law and policy.

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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.

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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.

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