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From the Gospel of Matthew to numerous US Supreme Court justices, many literary and legal sources have observed that how a society metes out punishment reveals core truths about its character. The Punitive Imagination is a collection of essays that engages and contributes to debates about the purposes and meanings of punishment in the United States. The Punitive Imagination examines some of the critical assumptions that frame America''s approach to punishment. It explores questions such as:· What is the place of concern for human dignity in our prevailing ideologies of punishment?·

The access of citizens to the courts has recently begun to gain attention from political scientists. An approach to this question is outlined, in which primary emphasis is given to macrolevel variables. It is suggested that propensity to litigate & mode of litigation will both be affected by political culture. Three political cultures are contrasted: traditionalistic, individualistic, & moralistic ones. Data from 5 federal judicial districts are examined, including those from: household telephone surveys of 5,148 households; court records of 1,649 cases in state & federal courts; telephone interview data with litigants in those cases; & survey data from interviews with 96 federal & state trial judges. The overall findings do not appear explicable on a political culture basis. However, certain specific findings appear to be related to political culture differences; for example, the state of SC can be interpreted as a traditionalistic culture, Philadelphia, Pa, as an individualistic one. It appears that current conceptions of political culture may be too narrow to include the legal dimension. 9 Tables. W. H. Stoddard.

In Knowing the Suffering of Others, legal scholar Austin Sarat brings together essays that address suffering as it relates to the law, highlighting the ways law imagines suffering and how pain and suffering become jurisprudential facts.From fetal imaging to end-of-life decisions, torts to international human rights, domestic violence to torture, and the law of war to victim impact statements, the law is awash in epistemological and ethical problems associated with knowing and imagining suffering. In each of these domains we might ask: How well do legal actors perceive and understand suffering

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 essays approach 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

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Situation of Legal Scholarship -- I Approaches to the Cultural Study of Law -- Law as Culture -- What It Is and What It Isn't: Cultural Studies Meets Graduate Student Labor -- Telling a Less Suspicious Story: Notes toward a Nonskeptical Approach to Legal/Cultural Analysis -- Freedom, Autonomy, and the Cultural Study of Law -- II Deploying Law and Legal Ideas in Culture and Society -- Ethnography and Democracy: Texts and Contexts in the United States in the 1990s -- Rules of Law, Laws of Science -- Law, Therapy, Culture -- III Reading Legal Events -- A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law -- Lacan and Voting Rights -- ''Into the Blue'': The Image Written on Law -- Contributors -- Index

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural lives"—past and present—of the state's ultimate sanction. They undertake this "cultural voyage" comparatively—examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea—arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment "lives" or "dies" in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition. Contributors: Sangmin Bae Christian Boulanger Julia Eckert Agata Fijalkowski Evi Girling Virgil K.Y. Ho David T. Johnson Botagoz Kassymbekova Shai Lavi Jürgen Martschukat Alfred Oehlers Judith Randle Judith Mendelsohn Rood Austin Sarat Patrick Timmons Nicole Tarulevicz Louise Tyler