An analysis of how problematic laws ought to be framed and considered

From the murder of George Floyd to the systematic dismantling of voting rights, our laws and their implementation are actively shaping the course of our nation. But however abhorrent a legal decision might bewhetherDred Scott v. Sanford orPlessy v. Fergusonthe stories we tell of the laws failures refer to their injustice and rarely label them in the language of infamy. Yet in many instances, infamy is part of the story law tells about citizens conduct. Such stories of individual infamy work on both the social and legal level to stigmatize and ostracize people, to mark them as unredeemably other.

Laws Infamy seeks to alter that course by making legal actions and decisions the subject of an inquiry about infamy. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how legal institutions themselves engage in infamous actions and urge that scholars and activists label them as such, highlighting the damage done when law itself acts infamously and focus of infamous decisions that are worthy of repudiation.Law's Infamyasks when and why the word infamy should be used to characterize legal decisions or actions. This is a much-needed addition to the broader conversation and questions surrounding laws complicity in evil.

Austin Sarat (Editor)
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He has collaborated with Charles J. Ogletree on numerous works for NYU Press, includingRacial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation: Beyond Law and Rights,Punishment in Popular Culture,When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice,The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States, andFrom Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. He is also the co-editor ofGuns in Law, Criminals and Enemies, Laws Mistakes,Reimagining To Kill a Mockingbird: Family,. Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law, and many others.

Lawrence Douglas (Editor)
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and Chair of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Professor Douglas is the author of seven books, includingThe Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust andThe Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, aNew York Times Editors Choice. His most recent book isWill He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020.

Martha M. Umphrey (Editor)
Martha Merrill Umphrey is Bertrand H. Snell 1894 Professor in American Government in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, and President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. She is the co-editor ofLives in the Law,The Place of Law, andThe Limits of Law, among others.