Sara Mayeux, Free Justice

Public defenders occupy a peculiar position in American society. In theory, they defend the interests of individuals who are in opposition to the state, but they are also funded by the government. They labor under a quasi-fiction that suggests that, but for their funding source, they are independent and akin to privately retained counsel. This liminal status—which blends autonomous agent with government bureaucrat—is a tension that explains some of the problems found in indigent defense today. In Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America, Sara Mayeux provides a dazzling account of the institutional development of this underappreciated component of the criminal justice system. Free Justice shows how the public defender position emerged from a host of factors—chiefly the liberalism of American legal culture as well as the complex relationship between lawyers, the market, and the modern state. Through a deft consideration of landmark case law,...

Criminal justice · Economic Justice · Government (linguistics) · Liberalism · Liminality · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Public defender · Restitution · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms