BOOK REVIEWThese brief sketches do not do justice to the intricacy and depth of scholarship that characterize the chapters. MODERN HISTORIES has been a bracing intellectual excursion, and although I found each of the articles to range from interesting to fascinating, the audience for non-specialists is likely to be limited. The book, or some of its chapters, will appeal to specialists in the history of criminal law doctrine or historians of colonialism. This is not a book for any except the most advanced students in PhD seminars. I am not a specialist in these fields, but my checkered history as a criminal law teacher who has read a fair dose of criminal law theory and history, taught a seminar on political trials, and began teaching criminal law in a post-colonial English-style law faculty in Anglophonic Africa in the afterglow of Empire, has weirdly provided me with the right grounding to at least appreciate this volume. I believe that non-specialists who are likely to find this book valuable are teachers of criminal law at law schools and universities. The book would go a long way toward expanding the intellectual horizons of that cohort. The book should also appeal to eighteenth century and nineteenth century social historians.
Unfortunately, I do not see this book appealing to most political scientists or even to most courts and law scholars who do not have a grounding in the doctrinal study of criminal law. The same goes for scholars in my discipline of criminal justice. This is not to say that criminal law has nothing to say about important issues of state power and civil rights. Quite the contrary. But the level of specialized learning needed to make these essays intelligible is so high as to reduce its usefulness to scholars concerned with state power. I should also add that many of the essays in the [*38] first two sections are indeed sufficiently focused on relatively technical (but important) issues of criminal law doctrine and administration to be of limited value for scholars more directly interested in confrontations between the individual and the state.
Unfortunately, I do not see this book appealing to most political scientists or even to most courts and law scholars who do not have a grounding in the doctrinal study of criminal law. The same goes for scholars in my discipline of criminal justice. This is not to say that criminal law has nothing to say about important issues of state power and civil rights. Quite the contrary. But the level of specialized learning needed to make these essays intelligible is so high as to reduce its usefulness to scholars concerned with state power. I should also add that many of the essays in the [*38] first two sections are indeed sufficiently focused on relatively technical (but important) issues of criminal law doctrine and administration to be of limited value for scholars more directly interested in confrontations between the individual and the state.
MODERN HISTORIES OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, by Markus D. Dubber and Lindsay Farmer (eds). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. 352pp. Cloth. $70.00. ISBN: 9780804754118. Paper. $27.95. ISBN: 9780804754125.
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