Description: "This book examines how legal regulation of the body has been rhetorically justified as well as how it has been practiced. Tracing a wide range of ideological, moral, and religious arguments invoked to justify regulation, increase its reach, and authorize punishment for infractions, this book locates a discursive incoherence and worsening hypocrisy in law's regulating of the body"--
Brief description: Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He has also served as Mellon Professor of the Humanities for the Bard Prison Initiative. He has authored or edited more than one hundred books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Human Execution.
Review Quotes: "Editors Austin Sarat and Susanna Lee shine stark light on how inconsistent and contested are regulations of reproduction, medical testing and treatment, punishment, and public health in the United States, post Covid-19. Striking essays by scholars and advocates expose how the language of autonomy, equality, harm, and dignity have little or no explanatory power when compared with the impact of individuals' economic resources, geographic locations, age, race, sex, and gender on government power deployed against human bodies. This compelling collection deserves reading and re-reading by anyone hoping to understand how contemporary America inscribes the political contests on people's physical lives."--Martha Minow, Harvard University