A sweeping history of the struggle to hold states to account for their gravest crimesThe Criminal State offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.At its heart is La...

The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice is an authoritative guide to the rapidly growing domain of transitional justice-the practices and processes of reckoning pursued in the aftermath of historic injustice. Since the neologism's coining in the late 1990s, “transitional justice” has become one of the 21st century's most influential practices of international humanitarianism. However, transitional justice projects often conceal the very violence they are intended to address - ...

If you take a video of police officers beating a Black man into unconsciousness, are you a witness or a bystander? If you livestream your friends dragging the body of an unconscious woman and talking about their plans to violate her, are you an accomplice? Do bodycams and video doorbells tell the truth? Are the ubiquitous technologies of visibility open to interpretation and manipulation? These are just a few of the questions explored in the rich and broadly interdisciplinary essays within...

An analysis of how problematic laws ought to be framed and consideredFrom 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 i...

The essays look at the consequences that legal practice has on the lives of its practitioners as well as on the individual legal subject and on the shape of shared identities. These essays challenge liberal and communitarian notions of what it means to live the law.In the first of the essays, Pnina Lahav presents a study of the Chicago Seven Trial to paint a picture of the law's power to serve as a site for the definition of a collective group identity. In contrast, Sarah Gordon fo...

It has long been standard practice in legal studies to identify the place of law within the social order. And yet, as The Place of Law suggests, the meaning of the concept of "the place of law" is not self-evident.This book helps us see how the law defines territory and attempts to keep things in place; it shows how law can be, and is, used to create particular kinds of places -- differentiating, for example, individual property from public land. And it looks at place as a metaphor...

Law calls communities into being and constitutes the "we" it governs. This act of defining produces an outside as well as an inside, a border whose crossing is guarded, maintaining the identity, coherence, and integrity of the space and people within. Those wishing to enter must negotiate a complex terrain of defensive mechanisms, expectations, assumptions, and legal proscriptions. Essentially, law enforces the boundary between inside and outside in both physical and epistemological ways.

The possibility of law in the absence of a nation would seem to strip law from its source of meaning and value. At the same time, law divorced from nations would clear the ground for a cosmopolitan vision in which the prejudices or idiosyncrasies of distinctive national traditions would give way to more universalist groundings for law. These alternately dystopian and utopian viewpoints inspire this original collection of essays on law without nations.This book examines the ways in ...

Key binaries like public/private and speech/conduct are mainstays of the liberal legal system. However, the pairing of criminal/enemy has received little scholarly attention by comparison. Bringing together a group of distinguished and disciplinarily diverse scholars, Criminals and Enemies, the most recent volume in the Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, addresses this gap in the literature. Drawing on political philosophy, legal analysis, and historical res...

Weapons have been a source of political and legal debate for centuries. Aristotle considered the possession of arms a fundamental source of political power and wrote that tyrants “mistrust the people and deprive them of their arms.” Today ownership of weapons—whether handguns or military-grade assault weapons—poses more acute legal problems than ever before. In this volume, the editors' introduction traces the history of gun control in the United States, arguing that until the 1980s courts...

Law and Mourning brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the many and complex ways that law both regulates and gives meaning to our experience of loss. The essays in this volume illuminate how law helps us to absorb and contend with loss and its reverberations, channeling the powerful emotions associated with death and protecting those vulnerable to them. At the same time, law creates a regulatory framework for death as it establishes the necessity for a clear...

Law and the Utopian Imagination seeks to explore and resuscitate the notion of utopianism within current legal discourse. The idea of utopia has fascinated the imaginations of important thinkers for ages. And yet—who writes seriously on the idea of utopia today?The mid-century critique appears to have carried the day, and a belief in the very possibility of utopian achievements appears to have flagged in the face of a world marked by political instability, social upheaval,...