Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice

Commendation Quotes: These elegant critical reflections on violence and law--mostly in the United States--focus on the paradoxes of violence as an object and means of the law's control, as well as place of violence among the conditions and complications of law's legitimacy and efficacy. The collection is compelling, even haunting, and profoundly enriching. The volume illuminates contemporary debates about law's violence, and makes engaging reading for academics in law and the human sciences, as well as others interested in the future of law as a social endeavor. Commendation Quotes: This volume performs an important function. It is an extremely worthwhile and timely project that raises issues of grave concern to anyone interested in the realities of legal practice, including sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, political scientists, legal theorists, and practicing lawyers. Table of Contents: CHAPTER ONE: Situating Law Between the Realities of Violence and the Claims of Justice: An Introduction by Austin Sarat 3 CHAPTER TWO: The Vicissitudes of Law's Violence by Jonathan Simon 17 CHAPTER THREE: Making Peace with Violence: Robert Cover on Law and Legal Theory by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns 49 CHAPTER FOUR: The Silence of the Laws: Justice in Cover's "Field of Pain and Death" by Marianne Constable 85 CHAPTER FIVE: A Judgment Dwelling in Law: Violence and the Relations of Legal Thought by Shaun McVeigh, Peter Rush, and Alison Young 101 CHAPTER SIX: Why the law Is Also Nonviolent by Peter Fitzpatrick 142 The Contributors 175 Index 177Marc Notes: Incl. bibl. ref. & index; Cloth avail. @ $42.50. Publisher Marketing: 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.

Contributor Bio:  Sarat, Austin Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence Political Science at Amherst College, where he is also Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Justice Hugo L. Black Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty (with Katherine Blumstein, Aubrey Jones, Heather Richard, and Madeline Sprung-Keyser, 2014); Re-imagining To Kill a Mockingbird: Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law (2013); Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Accommodation and its Limits (2012); and Civility, Legality, and the Limits of Justice (2014). Sarat is the editor of the journals Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. His book When Government Breaks the Law: Prosecuting the Bush Administration was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Huffington Post.