Punishment: Theory and Practice. (book reviews)

Law professor Robert Cover reintroduced the community of legal academics to the Weberian proposition that law should be understood as the institution embodying the state's monopoly of legitimate violence. The essays in Law's Violence explore how scholars in various disciplines can elaborate Weber's (and Cover's) insights, in this postmodern time.

Elaine Scarry, whose specialty is literary criticism, provides a case study of declarations of war to show how legal texts operate as performative utterances and are thereby connected to the legitimacy of the exercise of violence. Her ...