Law, Meaning, and Violence (Series)

The Law, Meaning, and Violence Series publishes books that explore the way meanings are constructed in law's narratives, that measures the connections among those narratives and institutions and practices of law, and that explore the ways those narratives, practices, and institutions embody and give voice to power and violence. While we are interested in books that take existing definitions of law seriously and explore them vigorously, we also invite works that expand and transcend existing definitions by either putting state law in context, by exploring new possibilities for world-creating normative orders, or by examining the lawlike elements of social practices.

Series Editors
Martha Minow, Harvard Law School
Austin Sarat, Amherst College

Showing 1 to 25 of 43 results.

Before Before

A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone

Reflecting on how building connections with others is necessary for humanity’s survival

Biblical Judgments

New Legal Readings in the Hebrew Bible

Analyzes the classical stories of the Hebrew Bible through the lens of modern law

Making Endless War

The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law

How two conflicts have shaped the relationship between law and war since 1945

The Limits to Union

Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights

Offers a case study of the same-sex marriage debate in Hawaii to discuss wider questions of political import

Strangers to the Law

Gay People on Trial

Describes the legal challenge to the Colorado anti-gay civil rights initiative

Bad Boys

Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity

with a foreword by Pedro A. Noguera

The classic ethnography on how implicit bias impacts black male students’ identities

The Truth Machines

Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India

Interrogation as a site of state sanctioned torture and violence

Keeping Hold of Justice

Encounters between Law and Colonialism

Colonialism is a structural injustice embedded in law; what possibilities for justice remain?

The Jurisprudence of Emergency

Colonialism and the Rule of Law

With a new Foreword by Antony Anghie and Preface by Austin Sarat

The tension between the ideology of liberty and government by law in British India shaped the development of colonial rule, and thus, Western legality

Punishment and Political Order

An incisive, eminently readable study of the evolving relationship between punishment and social order

Archiving Sovereignty

Law, History, Violence

An account of how courts repeat historical fictions that maintain sources of sovereign power.

The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law

Unfinished Business

An important examination of multinational corporations’ accountability in the era of globalization and the long shadow of the Holocaust

Curating Community

Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political

Reconsiders complex questions about how we imagine ourselves and our political communities

 

Refining Child Pornography Law

Crime, Language, and Social Consequences

Legal experts, sociologists, and social workers debate the definition of child pornography, the punishment of offenders, and the protection of victims

The First Global Prosecutor

Promise and Constraints

Legal scholars and practitioners examine the role of the ICC’s first prosecutor

Hybrid Justice

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

A definitive scholarly treatment of the ECCC from legal and political perspectives

Among the Lowest of the Dead

The Culture of Capital Punishment

"Perhaps the finest book ever written about capital punishment"
The Chicago Tribune

The Politics of Community Policing

Rearranging the Power to Punish

Community policing, the author argues, does not necessarily empower the community but often increases the power of the police

Communities and Law

Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities

Offers an alternative approach to liberalism and to communitarianism, with an empirical focus on Israel

Lives of Lawyers Revisited

Transformation and Resilience in the Organizations of Practice

A profound ethnographic analysis of how lawyers understand and respond to sweeping changes in the legal profession

Transformative Justice

Israeli Identity on Trial

Can Israel be both Jewish and democratic?

Law Stories

Accounts of law problems and the way they were handled, written by the responsible lawyers

From Noose to Needle

Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State

Discusses the dilemmas of the relationship between the liberal state and capital punishment

Butterfly, the Bride

Essays on Law, Narrative, and the Family

Uses fiction to enrich our understanding of the law that deals with marriage and the family