June 2003 - #7. LAW, VIOLENCE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE. Edited by Austin Sarat. Princeton University Press, 2001, 181 pp., $42.50.

Vermont Bar Journal

2003.

June 2003 - #7.

LAW, VIOLENCE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE. Edited by Austin Sarat. Princeton University Press, 2001, 181 pp., $42.50

Vermont Bar Journal - June 2003

LAW, VIOLENCE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE.

Edited by Austin Sarat. Princeton University Press, 2001, 181 pp., $42.50

Reviewed by David Orrick

For a long time, Austin Sarat, fully worthy of his chair as William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, was one of the few writers worried about court administration and how to improve it. Now, over the last decade or so, with the flexibility to which senior professors are entitled, he has been working on the relationship between law and violence. This has included considerable attention to capital punishment.1 In this area, he has been a leader in building on the seminal work of Robert Cover, the Yale law professor who, regrettably, died in 1985. This book could easily have been presented as a (belated) festschrift for Cover, and it stimulates us to keep thinking about the relationship of law to violence very much in Cover's tradition.

In this small2 volume, Sarat is an active editor, contributing to two chapters in a set of original essays by leading interdisciplinary legal scholars, all seeking to continue the analysis of Cover's seminal work.3 While one of the values of an edited volume is that one does not have to read all the component chapters to profit from the book, these essays all merit a careful reading.

The law is constituted as a response to the violence man does to his fellow man. Yet, with all its dignity, and peaceful resolution of disputes in the courtroom, law is nonetheless often a precursor to the imposition of violence, from the erstwhile corporal punishment to the ongoing use of capital punishment. As Sarat notes,4 the relationship of law to violence is so strong that our major concerns should be the legitimacy of the law's use of violence and the type of violence used. How else to explain the irony that the dominant form of capital punishment, at least in the United States, is now the comparatively gentle lethal injection, analogous to the euthanasia of our beloved pets by "putting them to sleep?" This is the irony - at a time when other countries are restraining or eliminating the use of capital punishment...