Harsh Justice

Criminal punishment in America is harsh and degrading--more so than anywhere else in the liberal west. Executions and long prison terms are commonplace in America. Countries like France and Germany, by contrast, are systematically mild. European offenders are rarely sent to prison, and when they are, they serve far shorter terms than their American counterparts. Why is America so comparatively harsh? In this novel work of comparative legal history, James Whitman argues that the answer lies in America's triumphant embrace of a non-hierarchical social system and distrust of state power which have contributed to a law of punishment that is more willing to degrade offenders.

"Historical Comparative Law and Comparative Legal History Legal history and comparative law overlap in important respects. This is more apparent with the use of some methods for comparison, such as legal transplant, natural law, or nation building. M.N.S. Sellers nicely portrayed the relationship. The past is a foreign country, its people strangers and its laws obscure.... No one can really understand her or his own legal system without leaving it first, and looking back from the outside. The comparative study of law makes one's own legal system more comprehensible, by revealing its idiosyncrasies. Legal history is comparative law without travel. Legal historians, perhaps especially in the United States, have been skeptical about the possibility of a fruitful comparative legal history, preferring in general to investigate the distinctiveness of their national experience. Comparatists, however, content with revealing or promoting similarities or differences between legal systems, by their nature strive toward comparison. Some American historians, especially since World War II, see the value in this"--

This book is a collection of pathbreaking essays by the foremost criminologists currently working in the UK. It contains up-to-the-moment essays on New Labour and crime control, the changing face of the East End of London, developments in restorative justice, and current controversies over the legal justification for torture. The contributors include Stanley Cohen (Folk Devils and Moral Panics; States of Denial); Robert Reiner (The Politics of the Police); Frances Heidensohn (Women and Crime); Nicola 978-0-19-920840-1HLA Hart); and Rod Morgan (Oxford Handbook of Criminology).

Rabbi Yosef Stern has distilled the profound, scintillating, pithy, incredibly rich discourses of the great Sfas Emes, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Alter of Ger, into enlightening and inspiring English essays. This book opens the portals to some of the loftiest and most enlightening thought of the last century on the Shalosh Regalim Pesach, Shavuos, and Succos.