Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1479812080 ISBN 13: 9781479812080

Publisher: NYU Press, 2021

Synopsis

An analysis of how problematic laws ought to be framed and considered
From the murder of George Floyd to the systematic dismantling of voting rights, our laws and their implementation are actively shaping the course of our nation. But however abhorrent a legal decision might be―whether Dred Scott v. Sanford or Plessy v. Ferguson―the stories we tell of the law’s failures refer to their injustice and rarely label them in the language of infamy. Yet in many instances, infamy is part of the story law tells about citizens’ conduct. Such stories of individual infamy work on both the social and legal level to stigmatize and ostracize people, to mark them as unredeemably other.
Law’s Infamy seeks to alter that course by making legal actions and decisions the subject of an inquiry about infamy. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how legal institutions themselves engage in infamous actions and urge that scholars and activists label them as such, highlighting the damage done when law itself acts infamously and focus of infamous decisions that are worthy of repudiation. Law's Infamy asks when and why the word infamy should be used to characterize legal decisions or actions. This is a much-needed addition to the broader conversation and questions surrounding law’s complicity in evil.

About this title

About the Authors

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He has also served as Mellon Professor of the Humanities for the Bard Prison Initiative. He has authored or edited more than one hundred books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Human Execution.

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and Chair of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Professor Douglas is the author of seven books, including The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His most recent book is Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020.

Martha M. Umphrey is Bertrand H. Snell 1894 Professor in American Government In the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst, the author of many law review articles, and is the co-editor of the Amherst Series in Law and Jurisprudence.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1479812080
• ISBN 13: 9781479812080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Sarat Austin, Douglas Lawrence, Umphrey Martha M.