Books published by New York University Press

"'Realist Ecstasy' explores religion, race, and performance in American literature"--

A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the livingDust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century.Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows' benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life's end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.

A history of legal emotions in William Blackstone's England and their relationship to justiceWilliam Blackstone's masterpiece, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), famously took the "ungodly jumble" of English law and transformed it into an elegant and easily transportable four-volume summary. Soon after publication, the work became an international monument not only to English law, but to universal English concepts of justice and what Blackstone called "the immutable laws of good and evil." Most legal historians regard the Commentaries as a brilliant application of Enlightenment reasoning to English legal history. Loving Justice contends that Blackstone's work extends beyond making sense of English law to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, sadness, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness. By enlisting an affective aesthetics to represent English law as just, Blackstone created an evocative poetics of justice whose influence persists across the Western world. In doing so, he encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice. Ultimately, Temple argues that the Commentaries offers a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice, and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.

Containing essays on the political, legal, and philosophical dimensions of political legitimacy, this volume reflects the cutting edge of responses to fundamental philosophical questions, drawing, in the distinctive NOMOS fashion, from political science, philosophy, and law.

Providing a concise history of progressively oriented Catholic Social Thought, which conveys the Catholic Church's position on a variety of social justice concerns, this book explains how lay Catholics in the United States have put these ideas into practice through a creative and sometimes provocative political engagement.

The unsung heroes who defend the accused from the ultimate punishmentWhat motivates someone to make a career out of defending some of the worst suspected killers of our time? In Capital Defense, Jon B. Gould and Maya Pagni Barak give us a glimpse into the lives of lawyers who choose to work in the darkest corner of our criminal justice system: death penalty cases. Based on in-depth personal interviews with a cross-section of the nation's top capital defense teams, the book explores the unusual few who voluntarily represent society's "worst of the worst."With a compassionate and careful eye, Gould and Barak chronicle the experiences of American lawyers, who-like soldiers or surgeons-operate under the highest of stakes, where verdicts have the power to either "take death off the table" or put clients on "the conveyor belt towards death." These lawyers are a rare breed in a field that is otherwise seen as dirty work and in a system that is overburdened, under-resourced, and overshadowed by social, cultural, and political pressures.Examining the ugliest side of our criminal justice system, Capital Defense offers an up-close perspective on the capital litigation process and its impact on the people who participate in it.

Covering 19th-century America, Ryan tells the story of legally and socially dependent people--free and enslaved African Americans, married white women, and servants--who resisted violence in Massachusetts and New York despite lacking formal protection through the legal system.al system.

The surprising true story of Mexico's hunt, arrest, and conviction of its first female serial killer who was responsible for the ghastly deaths of 40 elderly women in a fascinating analysis of what serial killing--often considered "killing for the pleasure of killing"--represents to us.nts to us.

Putting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, this work reassesses the commonplace view that a modern veneration of sexual monogamy and fidelity finds its roots in Protestant thought.

A pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority and achieving policy goals more effectively.