Drawing on legal scholarship, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology, the essays collected here exemplify the contributions cultural analysis and cultural studies make to interdisciplinary legal study. Some of these broad-ranging pieces describe particular approaches to the cultural study of the law, while others look at specific moments where the law and culture intersect. Contributors confront the deep connections between law, social science, and post-World War II American liberalism; examine the traffic between legal and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific discourses; and investigate, through a focus on recovered memory, the ways psychotherapy is absorbed into the law. The essayists also explore specific moments where the law is forced to comprehend the world beyond its boundaries, illuminating its dependence on a series of unacknowledged aesthetic, psychological, and cultural assumptions—as in Aldolph Eichmann’s 1957 trial, hiv-related cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent efforts to define the role of race in the construction of constitutionally adequate voting districts.

Contributors. Paul Berman, Peter Brooks, Wai Chee Dimock, Anthony Farley, Shoshanna Felman, Carol Greenhouse, Paul Kahn, Naomi Mezey, Tobey Miller, Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, Alison Young

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is president of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities and past president of the Law & Society Association. He has written and edited many books, including When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition.

Jonathan Simon is Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law. He is the author of Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890–1990 and coeditor of Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility.