Description: From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary...
Brief description: Bernadette Meyler is Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Curriculum and Professor (by courtesy) of English at Stanford University. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Law and Literature and The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities. Follow her on Twitter @MeylerBernie.
Review Quotes:
A valuable contribution to Law and Humanities scholarship and reflection on the future of liberal constitutionalism, Meyler's book cuts to the quick of pardoning practices from seventeenth-century England to contemporary America. Highlighting both the seemingly irresistible draw of pardoning as a theatrical assertion of sovereign power and the revolutionary opportunities latent in the uncoupling of sovereignty from the figure of the sovereign ruler, Meyler pierces the illusion of absolute authority and sets out an alternative Arendtian vision for the state grounded in forgiveness.
-- "The New Rambler"