Looking Back at Law's Century

This book describes a century of tremendous legal change, of inspiring legal developments, and profound failures. The twentieth century took the United States from the Progressive Era's optimism about law and social engineering to current concerns about a hyperlegalistic society, from philosophical idealism to the implementation of democracy, the rule of law, and the idea of human rights throughout the world. At the same time, law maintained its status as the key language of governance in the United States, the most "legal" of all countries, which has succeeded in making its version of the state a point of reference around the globe.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. He is the author of When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition. Bryant Garth is Director and Research Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the coauthor, with Yves Dezalay, of The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. Robert A. Kagan is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include the forthcoming Regulatory Encounters: Multinational Corporations and American Adversarial Legalism.