Books in the The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought series

Law and the Stranger explores the ways law identifies and responds to strangers within and across national borders.

Today ownership of weapons poses more acute legal problems than ever before. In this volume, contributors confront urgent questions, among them the usefulness of history as a guide in ongoing struggles over gun regulation, the changing meaning of the Second Amendment, the perspective of law enforcement, and individual perspectives on gun rights.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and Chair of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.

Law and War explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war¿a connection that has long vexed the jurisprudential imagination. Historically the term "war crime" struck some as redundant and others as oxymoronic: redundant because war itself is criminal; oxymoronic because war submits to no law. More recently, the remarkable trend toward the juridification of warfare has emerged, as law has sought to stretch its dominion over every aspect of the waging of armed struggle. No longer simply a tool for judging battlefield conduct, law now seeks to subdue warfare and to enlist it into the service of legal goals. Law has emerged as a force that stands over and above war, endowed with the power to authorize and restrain, to declare and limit, to justify and condemn. In examining this fraught, contested, and evolving relationship, Law and War investigates such questions as: What can efforts to subsume war under the logic of law teach us about the aspirations and limits of law? How have paradigms of law and war changed as a result of the contact with new forms of struggle? How has globalization and continuing practices of occupation reframed the relationship between law and war?

The essays assembled in How Law Knows provide a sample of the diversity, responsiveness, and influence that law's knowledge practices have on legal outcomes and the world beyond law.

This volume explores the ways law both traffics in and regulates secrecy.

Law without Nations offers sharp analyses of the fraught relationship between the nation and the state and of the legal forms and practices that they require, constitute, and violently contest.

Law and Catastrophe sketches contours of a relatively fresh-yet crucial-terrain of inquiry. It begins the work of developing a jurisprudence of catastrophe.

This book reminds us that examining the right to privacy and the public/private distinction is an important way of mapping the forms and limits of power that can legitimately be exercised by collective bodies over individuals and by governments over their citizens.

This book considers the problem of law's physical control of persons and it illuminates competing visions of the law: as both a tool of regulation and as an instrument of coercion or punishment.

This collection examines limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law's relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity.

Law and the Sacred explores questions about the foundational role of the sacred in the constitution of law, both historically and theoretically.

"Law on the Screen" advances understanding of connections between law and film, analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content - that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one - and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.