Roger Hood Annual Lecture

Thirty years on Death Row: When Reality Confronts Critical Theory

The time-table that opens Discipline and Punish—far more than the gruesome tortured death of Damiens—mirrors the experience of living on death row today. Thirty years and counting, a condemned man in Alabama awaits his execution, a lethal injection that may now serve more as a form of euthanasia to end the final stages of his metastasized cancer. The critical theory of punishment meets a life of litigation in a liberal democracy: What can we, as academics, learn when we take on such commitments to cases and people in the criminal justice system?

Professor Bernard Harcourt

The lecture was filmed, and is available on YouTube