The Limits of Law - Hardcover

by Austin Sarat (Editor), Lawrence Douglas (Editor), Martha Merrill Umphrey (Editor)

This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law's relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force.

Front Jacket

This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law's relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force.

Back Jacket

T]he essays collected in The Limits of Law, and the editors' well-crafted introductory essay, present 'law' in all of its richness and complexity.--Law and Politics Book Review
"These essays collectively give weight to the editors' claim, put forward in the introduction, that the study of law's limits has always, perhaps paradoxically, been central to the study of law's core, as well as to their deeper jurisprudential argument that law's normative, descriptive, and constitutive limits define law and its relation to power. An important collection for everyone interested in contemporary debates in jurisprudence, socio-cultural studies, and political theory, regarding law's reach, coherence, and desirability." --Robin West, Georgetown University Law Center

Author Biography

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College. Together, they are also the editors of Law on the Screen (Stanford University Press, 2005).