BOOKS: ​“Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment”

Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment by Harvard Law Professor Carol S. Steiker and University of Texas Law Professor Jordan M. Steiker examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s “extensive—and ultimately failed—effort to reform and rationalize the practice of capital punishment in the United States through top-down, constitutional regulation.” The authors argue that significant constitutional flaws persist in the death penalty system despite the Court’s attempts to regulate it, and present the case for its abolition in the near future.

In Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan called Courting Death, “the most important book about the death penalty in the United States—not only within the past generation but, arguably, ever—because of its potential to change how the country thinks about capital punishment.” The book explores the arbitrariness of the modern death penalty system, including racial and geographic disparities, and the Court’s failure to adequately address those problems.

In a review of the book for The Huffington Post, Michael Meltsner, a law professor at Northeastern University School of Law, describes the Steikers’ concluding argument, saying, “After taking the reader through the Court’s failed project to rationally regulate the death penalty, the Steikers set out ‘A Blueprint for Constitutional Abolition,’ a path they believe builds, on precedent, takes seriously language used by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the key swing vote in many previous decisions narrowing the death penalty, and protects the Court from the another backlash of the sort that occurred after the Furman decision.”