Austin Sarat
Biographic Data
| ID | 3609979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Austin Sarat |
| GIVEN NAMES | Austin |
| FAMILY NAME | Sarat |
| SIGNATURE | SARAT A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Amherst College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 132 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1257 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 96 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 36 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution
With a history marked by incompetence, political maneuvering, and secrecy, America's "most humane" execution method is anything but. From the beginning of the Republic, this country has struggled to reconcile its use of capital punishment with the Constitution's prohibition of cruel punishment. Death penalty proponents argue both that it is justifiable as a response to particularly heinous crimes, and that it serves to deter others from committin…
Law and Illiberalism
Human Dignity
Interrupting the Legal Person
Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution
Bearing Witness
Law and Society
This chapter presents an interview with Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. He is recognized as one of the founders of the law and society movement, and has served as president of the Law and Society Association. Professor Sarat is best known for his contributions to our understanding of the relationship of the criminal just…
Punishment in Popular Culture
The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States
Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty
Gruesome Spectacles tells the sobering history of botched, mismanaged, and painful executions in the U.S. from 1890 to the present. Since the book's initial publication in 2014, the cruel and unusual executions of a number of people on death row, including Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma and Joseph Wood in Arizona, have made headlines and renewed vigorous debate surrounding the death penalty in America. Austin Sarat's book instantly became an essenti…
The Death Penalty on the Ballot: American Democracy and the Fate of Capital Punishment
Investigating the attitudes about capital punishment in contemporary America, this book poses the question: can ending the death penalty be done democratically? How is it that a liberal democracy like the United States shares the distinction of being a leading proponent of the death penalty with some of the world's most repressive regimes? Reporting on the first study of initiative and referendum processes used to decide the fate of the death pen…
Legal Intermediation: A Processual Approach to Law and Economic Activity
Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice
When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition
When the Death Penalty Goes Public: Referendum, Initiative, and the Fate of Capital Punishment
This article considers what happens when the death penalty is put on the ballot. It reviews the history of referenda/initiatives concerning capital punishment from the start of the twentieth century to the present. That history reveals the role that referenda/ initiatives have played in struggles against and within governmental institutions. In addition, we find that abolitionists seldom prevail in those electoral contests. We consider the implic…
Final Judgments: The Death Penalty in American Law and Culture
Final Judgments: The Death Penalty in American Law and Culture explores the significance and meaning of finality in capital cases. Questions addressed in this book include: how are concerns about finality reflected in the motivations and behavior of participants in the death penalty system? How does an awareness of finality shape the experience of the death penalty for those condemned to die as well as for capital punishment's public audience? Wh…
The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe
Special Issue: Problematizing Prostitution: Critical Research and Scholarship
Sex worker or student? Legitimation and master status in academia / Jenny Heineman -- "In my head, I didn't feel like I had done anything wrong": women's experiences prostituting women and girls / Mahri Irvine -- Relationships among stigmatized women engaged in street-level prostitution: coping with stigma and stigma management / Corey Shdaimah, Chrysanthi S. Leon -- Reform or remand? race, nativity, and the immigrant family in the history of pro…
Special Issue: Feminist Legal Theory
Publisher's description: Half a century after the beginning of the second wave, feminist legal theorists are still writing about many of the subjects they addressed early on: money, sex, reproduction, and jobs. What has changed is the way that they talk about these subjects. Specifically, these theorists now posit a more complex and nuanced conception of power. Recent scholarship recognizes the complexities of power in contemporary society, the w…
The Handbook of Law and Society
The constitution of identity : new modalities of nationality, citizenship, belonging and being / Eve Darian-Smith -- The past, present, and future of rights scholarship / Jeffrey Dudas, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Michael McCann -- Law and social movements : old debates and new directions / Sandra Levitsky -- The rule of law and economic development : global scripts, vernacular translations / Ritu Birla -- Law in colonialism : legacies and lineages…
Injustice: Legal Aspects
Law and Lies: Deception and Truth-Telling in the American Legal System
Law and Lies: An Introduction
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Handbook of Law and Society
The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe
The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming
The emergence and transformation of disputes, especially before they enter formal legal institutions, is a neglected topic in the sociology of law. We provide a framework for studying the processes by which unperceived injurious experiences are-or are not-perceived (naming), do or do not become grievances (blaming) and ultimately disputes (claiming), as well as for subsequent transformations. We view each of these stages as subjective, unstable, …
Grievances, Claims, and Disputes: Assessing the Adversary Culture
The existence of a dispute has typically been the starting point for inquiries into dispute processing and resolution. This paper explores the origins of disputes in grievances and claims. It reports on a survey of households estimating the rates of grievances, claims, and disputes which could have been processed by a civil court of general jurisdiction. The paper also explores multivariate models of the probabilities that households experience s…
Law and Strategy in the Divorce Lawyer's Office
In the research from which this paper is derived, we have observed and tape-recorded approximately 115 lawyer-client conferences. Our observations were made in two sites, one in California and one in Massachusetts. In this paper we take an in-depth look at the nature of lawyer-client discourse by focusing on one conference. We explore three of the most important themes in that discourse. First is the discussion and characterization of the legal s…
The Pull of the Policy Audience
Much research in the sociology of law seeks to play a role informing policymakers about the effects of particular policy initiatives and to participate in debates about how to use law as an instrument of public policy. The paper examines the origins of policy studies in legal realism and describes the way contemporary law and society scholars selectively appropriate aspects of the realist heritage while ignoring others. Particular attention is pa…
Studying American Legal Culture: An Assessment of Survey Evidence
This paper argues that American legal culture, specifically the complex of public attitudes toward our major legal institutions and values, is truly democratic. The most persistent, although often unexplained, theme in that complex of attitudes is the demand for equal treatment. Americans endorse the ideals of equal treatment and believe that the most glaring defect of the present legal system is its failure to provide such treatment. Yet, as de …
Critical Traditions in Law and Society Research
This paper examines the place of critical inquiry within law and society studies. It suggests that such inquiry requires a periodic reexamination of both methodological and theoretical assumptions. In terms of method, critical inquiry would emphasize the particular and intensive as opposed to the general and extensive. In terms of theory, it calls attention to the limits of state legality and invites attention to ordinary social transactions in w…
Law and Social Relations: Vocabularies of Motive in Lawyer/Client Interaction
Drawing on C. Wright Mills' analysis of vocabularies of motive, this paper examines the ways lawyers and clients interpret and give meaning to the social behavior involved in the legal process of divorce. Based on observation of 115 law office conferences, the paper describes discussions between lawyers and clients concerning marriage failure, problems in the legal process, and planning strategy. It shows how lawyers and clients bring different a…
Alternatives in Dispute Processing: Litigation in a Small Claims Court
Social life is inevitably conflictual. Conflict occurs as individuals with different interests, goals, problems and perspectives seek to achieve a maximum share of the values which any society provides. Yet, the inevitability of conflict does not mean that its occurrence is welcomed. In fact, generally the opposite is true. Conflict, once it occurs, is difficult to end. Resolution is elusive because conflicts transform themselves almost as quickl…
Litigation in the Federal Courts: A Comparative Perspective
Courts, unlike most other political institutions, depend almost exclusively on the actions of others to initiate proceedings which comprise their agendas of decision-making. Formal rules and custom proscribe the independent searching out of cases by American courts. These courts may, in a sense, invite litigation by the way they handle certain kinds of issues, but they must await the development of real "cases and controversies;" and, more import…
Lawyers and Legal Consciousness: Law Talk in the Divorce Lawyer's Office
Two very different pictures of mass legal consciousness 1 have wide currency in contemporary legal scholarship.The first is one of public cynicism, of instrumentalism without conviction, of citizens both litigious and, at the same time, alienated from the legal system. 2 This image of mass legal consciousness informs many accounts of the so-called "litigation explosion" ' and suggests that legal institutions are no longer accorded sufficient legi…
Courts and Conflict Resolution: Problems in the Mobilization of Adjudication
This article attempts to assess the role of courts and other adjudicative institutions in the definition, interpretation, and management of conflict. Understanding the function of courts requires an understanding of a society's entire range of conflict management mechanisms. Particular emphasis is placed on those variables most likely to determine where and how conflicts will be solved.Adjudicative institutions can be effectively differentiated b…
L'émergence et la transformation des litiges: Réaliser, Reprocher, Réclamer
Felstiner William L. F., Abel Richard L., Sarat Austin. L'émergence et la transformation des litiges : réaliser, reprocher, réclamer. In: Politix, vol. 4, n°16, Quatrième trimestre 1991. Causes entendues - Les constructions du mécontentement (1) sous la direction de Annie Collovald et Brigitte Gaïti. pp. 41-54
Speaking of Death: Narratives of Violence in Capital Trials
How are violence and pain put into legal discourse? How does law distinguish its violence-capital punishment-from other kinds of violence? Do the strategies used to differentiate legal and extralegal violence alleviate anxiety about law and the uses to which law's violence is put? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of a capital trial in which an African-American man is being retried for the murder of a young white woman. I…
Dimensions of Institutional Participation: Who Uses the Courts, and How
Thinking About Courts: Toward and Beyond a Jurisprudence of Judicial Competence
This article reviews arguments about limitations on judicial competence or capacity, focusing on the need to go beyond such arguments to understand courts and their problems. Theoretical limitations on the competence and capacity of courts are compared with the record of judicial performance. The study examines performance in three areas in which courts are most likely to be thought ineffective: (1) cases involving unrepresented defendants, such …
Vengeance, Victims and the Identities of Law
Imagining the Law of the Father: Loss, Dread, and Mourning in The Sweet Hereafter
This essay takes the theme of the 1999 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, "The Legal Imagination: Taking on Cultural Studies," as an occasion for trying to promote an engagement between sociological studies and cultural studies. It argues that mass mediated images are as powerful and pervasive as other social forces with which sociological studies is already engaged and that the time has come to move from the study of law on the b…
Folk Knowledge as Legal Action: Death Penalty Judgments and the Tenet of Early Release in a Culture of Mistrust and Punitiveness
This article traces interconnections between folk knowledge-the everyday, taken-for-granted understandings and beliefs that shape people's perceptions, actions, and reactions to events and situations-and legal action. It examines the consciousness of crime and punishment as that consciousness comes to bear when citizens are given the responsibility for the life or death decision made by jurors in capital cases. It seeks to identify the sources of…
Beyond Discretion: Prosecution, the Logic of Sovereignty, and the Limits of Law
Today it is widely recognized in both academic literature and the mainstream media that prosecutors have substantial discretion. Yet prosecutorial decisions involve, in our view, something more than a straightforward exercise of discretion. In this article we move from the language of discretion to that of sovereignty to describe prosecutorial power. In so doing we want to move from the language of administration to the language of power. Focusin…
The Impact of Fee Arrangement on Lawyer Effort
This paper focuses on the impact of fee arrangement on the amount of time lawyers are likely to devote to civil cases ("effort"). Drawing upon data collected by the Civil Litigation Research Project, we compare the behavior of lawyers working on an hourly fee basis with the behavior of contingent fee lawyers. Like previous work on this issue, the paper finds that fee arrangement does influence the amount of effort lawyers devote to a given case. …
Judging in Trial Courts: An Exploratory Study
Authority, Anxiety, and Procedural Justice: Moving from Scientific Detachment to Critical Engagement
Memorializing Miscarriages of Justice: Clemency Petitions in the Killing State
Clemency in capital cases today has become quite rare. Capital clemency has been a victim of the rejection of rehabilitation as the guiding philosophy of criminal sentencing and of the increasing politicization of issues of crime and punishment since the 1960s. Yet despite the reluctance of governors to grant clemency, despite the difficulty of rectifying miscarriages of justice through the clemency process, petitions seeking commutation or pardo…
D'une démarche contestataire à un savoir méritocratique: Esquisse d'une histoire sociale de la sociologie juridique américaine
D'une démarche contestataire à un savoir méritocratique. L'émergence et l'essor d'une démarche sociologique dans le champ du droit savant nord-américain sont liés aux crises qui ont affecté un champ professionnel étroitement imbriqué dans l'histoire politique et économique. La période du New Deal a favorisé la réussite de la démarche contestataire des legal realists qui voulaient convaincre les Law Schools de l'apport que pouvaient représenter le…
The "New Formalism" in Disputing and Dispute Processing
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Reasoning in Politics: The Social, Political, and Psychological Bases of Principled Thought
Using data derived from a household probability sample of adults in Madison, Wisconsin, this paper describes and analyzes the way in which people think about political issues. Thinking that is general, deductive, and principled is contrasted with concrete, substantive thought. Education, knowledge about politics, and level of anxiety are used as independent variables in examining the way these forms of thought occur among different groups of peop…
Litigation in the Federal Courts: A Comparative Perspective
Courts, unlike most other political institutions, depend almost exclusively on the actions of others to initiate proceedings which comprise their agendas of decision-making. Formal rules and custom proscribe the independent searching out of cases by American courts. These courts may, in a sense, invite litigation by the way they handle certain kinds of issues, but they must await the development of real "cases and controversies;" and, more import…
Courts and Conflict Resolution: Problems in the Mobilization of Adjudication
This article attempts to assess the role of courts and other adjudicative institutions in the definition, interpretation, and management of conflict. Understanding the function of courts requires an understanding of a society's entire range of conflict management mechanisms. Particular emphasis is placed on those variables most likely to determine where and how conflicts will be solved.Adjudicative institutions can be effectively differentiated b…
Alternatives in Dispute Processing: Litigation in a Small Claims Court
Social life is inevitably conflictual. Conflict occurs as individuals with different interests, goals, problems and perspectives seek to achieve a maximum share of the values which any society provides. Yet, the inevitability of conflict does not mean that its occurrence is welcomed. In fact, generally the opposite is true. Conflict, once it occurs, is difficult to end. Resolution is elusive because conflicts transform themselves almost as quickl…
Judging in Trial Courts: An Exploratory Study
Legal Obligation: A Survey Study
Studying American Legal Culture: An Assessment of Survey Evidence
This paper argues that American legal culture, specifically the complex of public attitudes toward our major legal institutions and values, is truly democratic. The most persistent, although often unexplained, theme in that complex of attitudes is the demand for equal treatment. Americans endorse the ideals of equal treatment and believe that the most glaring defect of the present legal system is its failure to provide such treatment. Yet, as de …
Counsel for the United States: U.S. Attorneys in the Political and Legal Systems, by James Eisenstein
Journal Article Counsel for the United States: U.S. Attorneys in the Political and Legal Systems, by James Eisenstein Get access Counsel for the United States: U.S. Attorneys in the Political and Legal Systems by James Eisenstein. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 264 pp. $15.00. Austin Sarat Austin Sarat Amherst College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume…
Thinking About Courts: Toward and Beyond a Jurisprudence of Judicial Competence
This article reviews arguments about limitations on judicial competence or capacity, focusing on the need to go beyond such arguments to understand courts and their problems. Theoretical limitations on the competence and capacity of courts are compared with the record of judicial performance. The study examines performance in three areas in which courts are most likely to be thought ineffective: (1) cases involving unrepresented defendants, such …
The Policy Dilemma; Federal Crime Policy and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, 1968-1978
Access to Justice and the Limits of Law
This article examines the relationship between persistent demands for “access to justice” and the relatively low yield of court‐oriented social reform strategies. Access to justice has a symbolic attraction which is impossible to deny. Access may not insure justice or social reform, but it is an important political resource from which strategic bargaining advantages may flow. But the importance of the right to participate may be inversely related…
The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming
The emergence and transformation of disputes, especially before they enter formal legal institutions, is a neglected topic in the sociology of law. We provide a framework for studying the processes by which unperceived injurious experiences are-or are not-perceived (naming), do or do not become grievances (blaming) and ultimately disputes (claiming), as well as for subsequent transformations. We view each of these stages as subjective, unstable, …
Grievances, Claims, and Disputes: Assessing the Adversary Culture
The existence of a dispute has typically been the starting point for inquiries into dispute processing and resolution. This paper explores the origins of disputes in grievances and claims. It reports on a survey of households estimating the rates of grievances, claims, and disputes which could have been processed by a civil court of general jurisdiction. The paper also explores multivariate models of the probabilities that households experience s…
The Organizational Politics of Criminal Justice: Policy in Context
Dimensions of Institutional Participation: Who Uses the Courts, and How
The Evolution of Litigation in the Federal Courts of Appeals, 1895-1975
This article examines the business of three United States Courts of Appeals over the course of their history. The courts selected for study were the northeastern Second Circuit, the deep south Fifth Circuit, and the west coast Ninth Circuit. A random sample of 50 cases was drawn for each circuit for every fifth fiscal year beginning with 1895 and ending with 1975. The sample years were aggregated into four time periods: 1895-1910, 1915-1930, 1935…
U.S. v. Crime in the Streets. Thomas Cronin , Tania Cronin , Michael Milakovich Political Criminality: The Defiance and Defense of Political Authority. Austin Turk
A Symposium
Informalism, Delegalization, and the Future of the American Legal Profession
The Maturation of Political Jurisprudence
The Impact of Fee Arrangement on Lawyer Effort
This paper focuses on the impact of fee arrangement on the amount of time lawyers are likely to devote to civil cases ("effort"). Drawing upon data collected by the Civil Litigation Research Project, we compare the behavior of lawyers working on an hourly fee basis with the behavior of contingent fee lawyers. Like previous work on this issue, the paper finds that fee arrangement does influence the amount of effort lawyers devote to a given case. …
Law and Strategy in the Divorce Lawyer's Office
In the research from which this paper is derived, we have observed and tape-recorded approximately 115 lawyer-client conferences. Our observations were made in two sites, one in California and one in Massachusetts. In this paper we take an in-depth look at the nature of lawyer-client discourse by focusing on one conference. We explore three of the most important themes in that discourse. First is the discussion and characterization of the legal s…
Shadow Justice: The Ideology and Institutionalization of Alternatives to Courts
Critical Traditions in Law and Society Research
This paper examines the place of critical inquiry within law and society studies. It suggests that such inquiry requires a periodic reexamination of both methodological and theoretical assumptions. In terms of method, critical inquiry would emphasize the particular and intensive as opposed to the general and extensive. In terms of theory, it calls attention to the limits of state legality and invites attention to ordinary social transactions in w…
The Pull of the Policy Audience
Much research in the sociology of law seeks to play a role informing policymakers about the effects of particular policy initiatives and to participate in debates about how to use law as an instrument of public policy. The paper examines the origins of policy studies in legal realism and describes the way contemporary law and society scholars selectively appropriate aspects of the realist heritage while ignoring others. Particular attention is pa…
Political science (114 works) · Law (104 works) · Sociology (88 works) · Law (59 works) · Politics (42 works) · Law in Society and Culture (40 works) · Legal Education and Practice Innovations (37 works) · Psychology (35 works) · Law and economics (29 works) · Criminology (27 works)