Book Review: Is the Death Penalty Dying? European and American Perspectives
| Author | Michael Meranze |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663913502278a |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies 22(4)
and the potential new readings of other works of fiction which Kangaroo Courts gestures
toward attest to the brilliance of its critical vision.
MARCO WAN
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
References
Bakhtin M (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Flaubert G (1857) Madame Bovary. Edited and translated by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin.
AUSTIN SARAT AND JURGEN MARTSCHUKAT (eds), Is the Death Penalty Dying? European and
American Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 342, ISBN 9780521763516,
£58 (hbk).
The different trajectories of the United States and Europe haunt contemporary scholar-
ship on the death penalty. As anti-death penalty activists and scholars continually argue,
Europe appears to be leading a worldwide political and moral movement pointing to the
ultimate abolition of capital punishment. The United States, on the other hand, in con-
tinuing to deploy the death penalty, finds itself aligned with some of the globe’s most
serious violators of human rights law. Given that for nearly two centuries, the United
States and Europe had had similar histories of the death penalty, this recent division has
cried out for analysis.
Is the Death Penalty Dying? tackles this problem head-on and in wide-ranging fash-
ion. The volume addresses a remarkably disparate group of issues, ranging from the long
history of the modern death penalty, through the various techniques deployed to deter-
mine if someone is ‘eligible’ for death, onto the recent rise of punitiveness in both the
United States and Europe, the implication of images of the death penalty and their view-
ing history, a close examination of the ideological and legal infrastructure of European
abolition, and finally the possibilities and challenges of abolition in the United States.
The editors have brought together scholars from Europe and the United States. A wide
range of disciplines (legal studies of course, but also literature, political science and the-
ory, and history as well) are represented. There is ongoing communication between the
essays. The essays themselves are uniformly serious. Is the Death Penalty Dying? is a
book to grapple with.
The volume is divided into three sections: the first section on the contexts of capital
punishment, featuring essays by Pieter Spierenburg, Colin Dayan, and Jonathan Simon,
merges the historical sociological with the political theoretical. After Spierenburg offers
a long structural interpretation of the...
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