Civility, Legality, and Justice in America

Throughout American history, the discourse of civility has proven quite resilient, and concern for a perceived lack of civility has ebbed and flowed in recognizable patterns. Today we are in another era in which political leaders and commentators bemoan a crisis of incivility and warn of civility's demise. Civility, Legality, and Justice in America charts the uses of civility in American legal and political discourse. How important is civility as a legal and political virtue? How does it fare when it is juxtaposed with the claim that it masks injustice? Who advocates civility and to what effect? How are battles over civility played out in legal and political arenas? This book brings the work of several distinguished scholars together to critically assess the relative claims of civility and justice and the way law the weighs those virtues.

Introduction: the meanings and uses of civility Austin Sarat; 1. Disagreement, contempt, and the difficult work of liberal civility Teresa M. Bejan and Bryan Garsten; 2. Civility and formality Jeremy Waldron; 3. Civility and the alien Leti Volpp; 4. Against civility: a feminist perspective Linda M. G. Zerilli; Afterword: civility and the politics of sexuality Heather Elliott.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence Political Science at Amherst College, where he is also Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Justice Hugo L. Black Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty (with Katherine Blumstein, Aubrey Jones, Heather Richard, and Madeline Sprung-Keyser, 2014); Re-imagining To Kill a Mockingbird: Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law (2013); and Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Accommodation and its Limits (2012). Sarat is the editor of the journals Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. His book When Government Breaks the Law: Prosecuting the Bush Administration was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Huffington Post.