Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment

This MCLR+ event on David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton 2025) gathers an international and interdisciplinary panel of scholars to reflect on several of the fundamental analytic and normative issues explored in this important and ambitious book, including developing a nuanced comparative-historical analysis of U.S. penality, laying out a broader methodological framework for similar accounts of other penal systems, and–crucially–advancing a theory of the relation between political economy and crime control and a realistic framework for pursuing progressive change.

• Patricia Faraldo Cabana & José Ángel Brandariz García (University of A Coruña, Law)
• Katja Franko (University of Oslo, Criminology)
• Rocío Lorca (University of Chile, Law)
• Sara Wakefield (Rutgers University, Criminal Justice)
• David Garland (New York University, Law & Sociology) (author)
• Morten Boe (MPI Freiburg) (moderator)

The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum.