Description: In Knowing the Suffering of Others, legal scholar Austin Sarat brings together essays that address suffering as it relates to the law, highlighting the ways law imagines suffering and how pain and suffering become jurisprudential facts.
Review Quotes: "Knowing the Suffering of Others represents a serious contribution not only to legal studies but also to cultural and interdisciplinary law-and-humanities scholarship. How, indeed, is it possible for the law to know suffering when it is so often either the cause or the outcome of this suffering? In considering suffering from this perspective and offering a range of methodologies and critical approaches, Sarat broadens the field to consider tort law and trauma and torture, among other critical issues. The strength of this volume lies in the diversity of perspectives it offers: its contributors are legal scholars, historians, and literary critics, and the book is thus able to cover considerable ground without sacrificing analytical depth." -- Ravit Reichman, author of The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination