Austin Sarat is Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Sarat is a pioneering figure in the development of legal study in the liberal arts, of the humanistic study of law, and of the cultural study of law. He is also an internationally renown scholar of capital punishment, specializing in efforts to understand its social, political, and cultural significance in the United States. Professor Sarat founded both Amherst College’s Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought and the national scholarly association, The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. He served as President of the Law and Society Association and of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs. He is author or editor of more than ninety books including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States. He is currently writing a book entitled Hollywood’s Law: Film, Fatherhood, and the Legal Imagination. He is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. His public writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The National Law Journal, The Providence Journal, The Los Angeles Times ,The American Prospect, and The Daily Beast and he has been a commentator or guest on HuffPost Live, National Public Radio, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Public Television’s The News Hour, Odyssey, Democracy Now, RT International, ABC World News Tonight, MSNBC, Aljazeera America, All In with Chris Hayes, and The O’Reilly Factor. A profile of him in US News and World Report noted that he is “one of the best loved professors at Amherst College” and praised his teaching for combining “innovation and inspiration.”
The Supreme Court just guaranteed that America will continue its long-held tradition of botched executions. Today’s decision in Glossip v Gross, upholding the use of midazolam in lethal injections, is in keeping with the court’s…
