Why Do You Think They Call It CAPITAL Punishment? Reading the Killing State

Abstract

Austin Sarat is widely known for work on cause lawyering, divorce lawyers, and white collar crime, and for influential arguments on behalf of integrating humanities topics and methods into empirical studies of law and society. Sarat is not, however, particularly known as a death penalty scholar, an intensive sub-field of socio-legal studies that has been dominated by scholars wholly captured by the compelling nature of the subject. A reader of Sarat's bibliography would have to go back to 1976 when Sarat, as a young political scientist, published research coauthored with an equally junior psychologist, Neil Vidmar, on how public opinion on the death penalty was affected by targeted education on particular aspects of the death penalty including empirical studies doubting its deterrent effects, and on other information designed to raise concerns about the justice of capital punishment (Sarat & Vidmar 1976). In terms of both its methodology and the logic of its inquiry, When the State Kills could hardly differ more from the Sarat and Vidmar study. Between the two, one can mark significant shifts in both the enterprise of socio-legal studies and the place of capital punishment in American political culture.