Book Review: Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663914546586d |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
essential. Such innovation can help to reveal blind spots in our understanding of law’s
production by and within, and interaction with, the social and political, and in doing
so it serves to highlight that law is neither determinate nor reducible to those or indeed
other things, but is rather part of a complex web. And arguably ‘the’ key task of this sort
of innovation is to cast light on the consequences for those who are still too often, and
even increasingly, overlooked: people who are (made to be) on the fringes of our neo-
liberal times, albeit often in ways that obscure the ways in which they are marginalized
and even excluded. It is to be hoped that future work will continue to develop and use-
fully deploy tools that help to maintain scholarship’s engagement with this current – and
seemingly natural and unchosen – reality. In that regard, attention to the transnational
promises many further and essential case studies.
MARK FLEAR
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
References
Aronson J (2007) Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profil-
ing. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press.
Daemmrich A (2006) Pharmacopolitics: Drug Regulation in the United States and Germany.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Flear ML, Farrell A-M, Hervey TK and Murphy T (eds) (2013) European Law and New Health
Technologies. Oxford: OUP.
Jasanoff S (ed) (2011) Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
PIPPA HOLLOWAY, Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizen-
ship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 236, ISBN 9780199976089, £25.00 (hbk).
Living in Infamy forms part of a growing literature on the disenfranchisement of crim-
inals. Pippa Holloway, Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, con-
tributes an additional set of arguments to those already provided in recent years directed
at capturing the importance of disenfranchisement (the legal deprivation of voting rights
as consequence of a criminal conviction) as a fundamental aspect of Western traditions
of both punishment and democracy. In a tome which focuses on the historical dimensions
of the topic, she brings in a much needed perspective into the insights provided on polit-
ical philosophy by Pettus (2005), on sociology by Manza and Uggen (2006), and on legal
and political science by Ewald and Rotthinghaus’s edited collection (2009).
Evidencing a treme ndous documentary w ork, which draws on jud icial and legislati ve
recordsin particular, Hollowayrenarrates and augmentsthe history of racialdisenfranchise-
ment in the UnitedStates, notably in the southernstates, in the extended periodprevious to
the emergenceof the civil rights movements,to help us appreciate the entanglement of law
and politics in the prison industrial complex. Her work both amends and broadens our
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