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.”