Dissenting Voices in American Society

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence Political Science at Amherst College and Justice Hugo L. Black Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is author or editor of more than seventy books, including The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States; The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture; When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition; The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives, Law, Violence; Possibility of Justice, Pain, Death, and the Law; Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution; When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice; and the two-volume Capital Punishment. Sarat is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. He is currently writing a book entitled Hollywood's Law: Film, Fatherhood, and the Legal Imagination. His book, When Government Breaks the Law: Prosecuting the Bush Administration, was recognized as one of the best books of 2010 by the Huffington Post. In May 2008 Providence College awarded Sarat with an honorary degree in recognition of his pioneering work in the development of legal study in the liberal arts and his distinguished scholarship on capital punishment in the United States.

1. The ethics of an alternative: counterfactuals and the tone of dissent Ravit Reichman; 2. The role of counterfactual imagination in the legal system: misplaced judgment or inevitable dissent? Suzette M. Malveaux; 3. American animus: dissent and disapproval in Bowers v. Hardwick, Romer v. Evans, and Lawrence v. Texas Susanna Lee; 4. Animus-supported argument vs. animus-supported standing: a comment on Susanna Lee's American animus Heather Elliott; 5. Dissent and authenticity in the history of American racial politics Kenneth W. Mack; 6. Comment on Kenneth Mack, 'dissent and authenticity in the history of American politics' Tony A. Freyer; 7. Dissent in the legal academy and the temptations of power: the difficulty of dissent Richard H. Pildes; 8. Why dissent isn't free: a commentary on Pildes' the difficulty of dissent Bryan K. Fair; 9. Why societies don't need dissent (as such) Mark Tushnet; 10. Questioning the value of dissent and free speech more generally: American skepticism of government and the protection of low-value speech Ronald J. Krotoszynski.