Trial Films on Trial: Law, Justice, and Popular Culture
“Trial Films on Trial successfully brings together distinguished and emerging scholars to engage important questions about law’s representation in film and, fascinatingly, film’s law-like logic.”
—Daniel LaChance, author of Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States
“A marvelously generative text which will, I am certain, stand as an important and defining contribution to the field of law and film.”
—Patricia Ewick, coauthor of The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life
University of Alabama Press 2019
Law and Mourning
“These essays lead the reader progressively deeper into the relationship between law and mourning, considering last testaments that restrict a beneficiary's marriage, sperm preservation, public rituals of mourning (and their suppression), melancholic judges, and the lamentations of scholars who mourn the loss of justice itself.”―Linda Ross Meyer, author of The Justice of Mercy
“This volume demonstrates how varied and extensive the conjunction of mourning and law is, and it also makes a powerful case for how this intersection needs to be examined through an interdisciplinary lens. The contributors, all impressive and productive scholars, come from a broad range of fields, speaking across methodological and scholarly divides and opening avenues for further inquiry by inviting scholars to think creatively and ambitiously about our critical practices.”―Ravit Reichman, author of The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination
University of Massachusetts Press 2018
Law and Performance
“Here is a pathbreaking law book that picks up on the emerging interest in affect theory, sensory studies (including forays in synesthesia studies) in conjunction with the cultural and political implications of law in action. It invites novel modes of analysis, and in the process brings into view previously unobserved phenomena pertaining to law, the perception of law, and law's efficacy and legitimation.”―Richard K. Sherwin, author of When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture
“This collection is a must read for scholars of performance studies as well as legal studies researchers and practitioners.”―CHOICE
University of Massachusetts Press 2018
Criminals and Enemies
“A bold new collection of essays that weaves together political philosophy, legal analysis, and historical research.”―Laura A. Dickinson, author of Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs
University of Massachusetts Press 2018
Trials
This volume gathers a collection of the most seminal essays written by leading experts in the fields of law, and cultural studies, which address the cultural dimension of trials. Taken together, these essays conceive of trials as sites of legal performance and as critical public spaces in which the law both encounters and interacts dialogically with the culture in which it is embedded. Inquiring into the contours of that dialogic relation, these essays trace the paths of cultural stories as they circulate in and through trial settings, examine how trials emerge out of particular social and historical contexts, and suggest ways in which trials themselves, as both singular events and generic forms, circulate and signify in culture.
Routledge 2017
Law and the Utopian Imagination
“This book of six essays on law and the utopian imagination is written by scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including English literature, fine arts, art history and cultural studies, political science, and legal philosophy and jurisprudence. The result is wide ranging and highly stimulating. Although the topics seem almost at odds with one other, the authors each pursue a unique tangent and tap into their particular areas of expertise to tease out exceptionally interesting logical constructions and conclusions as to the meaning and relationship of imagined utopias and legal strictures."”—Andrew Fair; H-Net
Stanford Law Books 2014
Law and War
“Law and War offers deep, rigorous, and diverse reflections on the potential, and peril, for law's efforts to humanize war. This is a valuable addition in a field of growing significance to legal, political, and policy scholars, and beyond.”—David Mednicoff; University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Enhanced with the inclusion of a comprehensive index, Law and War is a collective work of outstanding scholarship and a highly recommended addition to academic library Judicial Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.”—Midwest Book Review
Stanford Law Books 2014
Reimagining to Kill a Mockingbird: Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice Under Law
Fifty years after the release of the film version of Harper Lee's acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird, this collection of original essays takes a fresh look at a classic text in legal scholarship. The contributors revisit and examine Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch, their community, and the events that occur there through the interdisciplinary lens of law and humanities scholarship.
University of Massachusetts Press 2013
Imagining New Legalities: Privacy and Its Possibilities in the 21st Century
“Imagining New Legalities advances our thinking about powerful political and cultural challenges embedded in our efforts to improve our understanding of the law. This is a truly thoughtful, timely, and well-grounded collection of essays.”—William Lyons; University of Akron
Stanford Law Books 2012
“This book's broad range of approaches to the relationship between punishment and regulation is refreshing and engaging. There are no works that offer anything like the variety that this collection offers. The diversity of views, and the consequent appreciation of the complexity of the issues, makes this a truly valuable addition to the literature. —Carol Steiker; Harvard Law School
Subjects of Responsibility: Framing Personhood in Modern Bureaucracies
This volume examines the ongoing overlap between earlier liberal understandings of responsibility and the rise of new and biopolitical forms of responsibility in our time. Liberal discourses of responsibility no longer correspond to actual political practices (if they ever did) but such discourses live on nonetheless in ways that pervert, distort and enable contemporary practices. In this way, the language of individual responsibility has been mapped uneasily onto a practice based on torts, insurance and risk assessment. The contributions in this volume wonderfully illuminate this clash of values; they richly describe the consequences of such bifurcation and, in varying ways, ask us what contemporary practices are best suited for our times. They consider how best to navigate the complex overlay of discourses that constitute contemporary legal and ethical approaches to responsibility. This book will be invaluable to those scholars who write on responsibility and a delight to read for anyone interested in these questions.―James Martel, San Francisco State University
Fordham University Press 2011
Law without Nations
“This book is especially noteworthy given the current ascendance of international and regional alliances in global governance. It does an excellent good job of illustrating the reality of legal pluralism, the weakness of legal positivism, and the vitality of so-called non-state law.”― Kathleen Moore; University of California, Santa Barbara
“There is a great deal of novelty and insight in Law without Nations. The essays push thinking on the subject beyond simple trade-offs between international and national legal systems. The book draws on a dazzlingly diverse array of works and I find the interconnection of the contributors' arguments particularly engaging.”― David Mednicoff; University of Massachusetts
Stanford Law Books 2010
Law and the Stranger
“This pioneering book directly addresses the leading legal issue of our day: how does the law deal (or not deal) with the stranger? By way of response, this question occasions a dazzling range of perspectives and approaches, fusing jurisprudence, philosophy, cultural studies, and politics under the rubric of 'strangeness.' A brilliant and rewarding work that promises a breakthrough in the interdisciplinary study of the law.”—William P. MacNeil ― Griffith University
“This is a brilliant and instructive book on the role of the stranger in law and culture. The individual essays demonstrate a rigorous engagement with the organizing themes and principles of the stranger debate from cosmopolitanism to human rights to hospitality and immigration. An amazing achievement.”—Nan Goodman; University of Colorado at Boulder
Stanford Law Book 2010
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
Lives in the Law
“Lives in the Law” is a provocative collection of essays considering from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds the myriad ways in which legal categories come to constitute the lives and identities of people and groups."—Paul Schiff Berman, University of Connecticut School of Law.
University of Michigan Press 2009
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
Law and Catastrophe
“Law and Catastrophe is an edited collection that explores this inextricable and symbiotic relationship between these two concepts in the short span of five chapters. It presents to the reader a witty and often engaging group of literary essays that dissect various guises of how law and catastrophe interpenetrate.”—Law and Politics Book Review
“Law and Catastrophe offers a diverse and fascinating set of essays. There has never been a more urgent need for such a work on catastrophe and law.” —Anthony J. Sebok, Brooklyn Law School
“This cogent work is based on the insight that, even when it proves itself palpably unable to deal with catastrophe, law can yet reassert itself, reproducing the bases of its authority over and over again. Indeed, this very act of reassertion is revealed to be the basis of legal authority itself. This book is a must read for any scholar interested in seeing the performance of law when its veneer of total control and stability have been stripped away.” —James R. Martel, San Francisco State University
Stanford University Press 2007
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
Law and the Sacred
“[An} interesting collection, worthy of attention by scholars in a variety of fields.”—CHOICE
“Law and the Sacred brings together original and stimulating interdisciplinary work on the complex interdependence of law and religion. Indeed, the authors expand well beyond simple categories of law and religion to explore the more interesting and novel nuances of laws of the sacred and the sacrilization of law.”—David Mednicoff, University of Massachusetts
“The essays in this volume push well beyond the boundaries of more familiar research on the relationship between politics and religion. Exploring topics as diverse as Islamic legal theory, the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Kafka's The Trial, and the contemporary constitution of sovereign political power, the contributors call into question any easy opposition between the sacred and the secular, and so unsettle a central myth of Enlightenment modernism.”—Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, Whitman College
Stanford University Press 2006
Edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
How Law Knows
“This work raises new questions while also reexamining standard socio-legal issues in refreshing ways. The result is a rich and innovative look at the routines of truth seeking and fact finding.”—Patricia Ewick, Clark University
“How Law Knows is a useful and interesting collection addressing law’s ways of knowing. The authors reveal that the establishment and organized use of legal facts is varied, historical, and amenable to a rich and diverse set of methods of inquiry.”—Jon Goldberg-Hiller, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Stanford University Press 2006
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
The Limits of Law
This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law's relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force.
Stanford University Press 2005
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
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.
Stanford University Press 2005
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
The Place of Law
“Recent scholarship has rediscovered the spatial dimension of society. This volume brings together some of the leading lights of that revival with some of the most innovative scholars in sociolegal studies, to reconsider the place of law and law's capacity to put people in their place. At a time when power relentlessly promotes a generic version of the rule of law as a mandatory salvation for all peoples and places, The Place of Law offers a vital rejoinder.” -Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley
“The Place of Law is a worthy successor to an outstanding series of edited collections on law and culture. The essays range from the Stalinist Soviet Union to the scientific laboratory, from the Internet to the nation-state and back; they explore why places and metaphors of places seem to matter so much to law, and how new structures of freedom may produce new forms of control.” — Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School
University of Michigan Press 2003
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey
Law's Madness
“A thoroughly engaging collection of essays that plumbs the nuances of an important topic. While many have observed law's role as a bulwark against passion and chaos, the essays in Law's Madness suggest that law and madness actually constitute each other. Thus, what we think of as 'law' always emerges from the unstable effort to distinguish official legal doctrine from that which is repressed as something other than law. This book will be a 'must have' for numerous scholars interested in interdisciplinary examinations of law, from sociolegal studies to law and humanities to legal behavioralism.” — Paul Schiff Berman, University of Connecticut School of Law
University of Michigan Press 2003