The Accidental Death Penalty

Mandery considers Carol and Jordan Steiker’s new book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, which he calls “an extraordinary scholarly achievement” that “immediately takes its place as the seminal text” on capital punishment. He describes Courting Death “most damningly [as] a condemnation of the way the Supreme Court—and lawyers in general—talk about complicated ethical issues, a vivid illustration of how disempowering and problematic it is for judges to drape themselves ‘in the longiloquent language of a generalized logic.’”