Sarat - Böcker

More than forty years after Brown v. Board of Education put an end to the segregation of the races by law, current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, and racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty about the place and meaning of race in American culture and the role of law in guaranteeing racial equality. Moreover, all sides in those debates claim to be the true heirs to Brown, even as they disagree vehemently about its meaning. This book takes the continuing controversy about race in law and culture as an invitation to revisit Brown, and uses Brown as a lens through which to view that controversy and the issues involved in it. The essays collected here describe the contested legacy of Brown as well as the way it is implicated in America's persistent uncertainties about race. In so doing they confront crucial questions about race, law, and culture in contemporary America. Taken together, they provide a fresh look at Brown in a lively, diverse way.

Why do some lawyers devote themselves to a given social movement or political cause? How are such deeds of individual commitment and personal belief justly executed, given the ideals of disinterested professional service to which lawyers are (in theory, at least) supposed to adhere? What can we learn from such lawyers about the relationship between law and politics? Cause Lawyering is a wise and varied collection of responses to these questions, featuring a number of distinguished legal scholars concerned with anti-poverty lawyers, lawyers who work against capital punishment, immigration lawyers, and other lawyers working to end oppression. Editors Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold have assembled here a valuable cross-national portrait of lawyers compelled to sacrifice financial gain so as to use their legal skills in the promotion of a more just society. These telling and important essays fully explore the relationship between cause lawyering and the organized legal professions of many different countries-the US, England, South Africa, Israel, Cuba, and so forth.They describe the utility of law as a resource in political struggles and, conversely, highlight the constraints under which lawyers necessarily operate when they turn to politics. Some provide broad theoretical overviews; others present rich case studies. Advancing a fundamental argument about the very nature of the legal profession, this book explains the strategies that cause lawyers deploy, as well as the challenges they face in trying to be legally astute and effective while remaining politically devoted and aware. Although it is a controversial way of practicing law, cause lawyering, as explicated in the essays in this volume, is indeed indispensable to the legitimization of professional authority.

Although the US Supreme Court temporarily halted capital punishment in the early 1970s, it has since returned with a vengeance. Today Americans live in a "killing state" in which the death penalty has become an important part of criminal justice policy, and sometimes a major factor in electoral politics. Bringing together the work of several prominent scholars, The Killing State helps explain why the USA clings tenaciously to capital punishment long after other democratic nations have abandoned it. The book signals the emergence of a new way of thinking about state killing that moves beyond abstract moral argument and narrow policy debate to assess its impact upon the US legal system, its powerful symbolic appeal, and its place in contemporary "culture wars."