Alma Bashears escaped her Appalachian roots to forget the memories of a brutal rape. Now, a brilliant attorney, she receives an urgent call from her estranged family-Come back home. Your family needs you. Alma returns to defend her brother against a trumped-up murder charge. Upon discovering the prosecutor is the boy responsible for her rape, this white-trash hollow girl will dispense a little country justice.
We call it justice—the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice. What, if anything, distinguishes punishment at the hands of the government from a victim’s individual desire for retribution? Are vengeance and justice really so very different? No, answers legal scholar and novelist Thane Rosenbaum in Payback: The Case for Revenge—revenge is, in fact, indistinguishable from justice. Revenge, Rosenbaum argues, is not the problem. It is, in fact, a perfectly healthy emotion. Instead, the problem is the inadequacy of lawful outlets through which to express it. He mounts a case for legal systems to punish the guilty commensurate with their crimes as part of a societal moral duty to satisfy the needs of victims to feel avenged. Indeed, the legal system would better serve the public if it gave victims the sense that vengeance was being done on their behalf. Drawing on a wide range of support, from recent studies in behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics, to stories of vengeance and justice denied, to revenge practices from around the world, to the way in which revenge tales have permeated popular culture—including Hamlet, The Godfather, and Braveheart—Rosenbaum demonstrates that vengeance needs to be more openly and honestly discussed and lawfully practiced. Fiercely argued and highly engaging, Payback is a provocative and eye-opening cultural tour of revenge and its rewards—from Shakespeare to The Sopranos. It liberates revenge from its social stigma and proves that vengeance is indeed ours, a perfectly human and acceptable response to moral injury. Rosenbaum deftly persuades us to reconsider a misunderstood subject and, along the way, reinvigorates the debate on the shape of justice in the modern world.
Alma Bashears had fled Contrary, Kentucky, severing her Appalachian roots, to forget a brutal gang rape. Now she's a savvy attorney at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. When Alma's brother is charged with murder, she discovers that the prosecutor is the boy responsible for her rape. And a "white-trash hollow girl" is about to dispense a little country justice. Films rights have been sold to Warner Television Production.
This book addresses the problem of justifying the institution of criminal punishment. It examines the “paradox of retribution”: the fact that we cannot seem to reject the intuition that punishment is morally required, and yet we cannot (even after two thousand years of philosophical debate) find a morally legitimate basis for inflicting harm on wrongdoers. The book comes at a time when a new “abolitionist” movement has arisen, a movement that argues that we should give up the search for justification and accept that punishment is morally unjustifiable and should be discontinued immediately. This book, however, proposes a new approach to the retributive theory of punishment, arguing that it should be understood in its traditional formulation that has been long forgotten or dismissed: that punishment is essentially a defense of the honor of the victim. Properly understood, this can give us the possibility of a legitimate moral justification for the institution of punishment.
In the wake of Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, and secret torture centres in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, Revenge versus Legality addresses the relationship between law and wild or vigilante justice; between the power to enforce retribution and the desire to seek revenge. Taking up a variety of narratives from the eras of Romanticism, Realism, Modernism and the Contemporary period, and including new theories to explain the interactions that occur between legalistic courtroom justice and the vigilante variety, Revenge versus Legality analyzes some of the main obstacles to justice, ranging from judicial corruption, to racism and imperialism. The book culminates in a consideration of that form of crime or lawlessness that poses the most serious threat to the rule of law: vigilante justice masquerading as legality. With its mixture of politics, literature, law, and film, this lively and accessible book offers a timely reflection on the enduring phenomenon of revenge.
This book, the first to trace revenge tragedy's evolving dialogue with early modern law, draws on changing laws of evidence, food riots, piracy, and debates over royal prerogative. By taking the genre's legal potential seriously, it opens up the radical critique embedded in the revenge tragedies of Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle and Middleton.
The author of this text aims to show that revenge is a required form of justice that should be incorporated into the criminal justice system. He argues that the current system disempowers those who are victims of crime, the accused, and their respective communities.
One of the foremost courtroom lawyers of his generation. Alan M. Dershowitz takes controversial stands based on the principle of equal justice for all. Along the way, he has authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Chutzpah; the bestselling account of the Claus von Bulow case Reversal of Fortune; and the bestselling courtroom drama The Advocate's Devil. Now Dershowitz has written a novel that is at once personal, passionate, and towering: an explosive legal thriller that pits Dershowitz's literary alter ego, attorney Abe Ringel, against the worst crime of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust. What if you witnessed the most abominable deeds that human beings can inflict upon each other? What if you came face-to-face with the very man who had slaughtered your family before your eyes? That is the question confronted by a celebrated professor named Max Menuchen. Max has found the man who had killed his entire family in cold blood more than a half century before. Max, who has never before broken a law, cannot turn down his chance for revenge. In 1943 Marcellus Prandus was a Lithuanian militia captain who carried out the blood-thirsty orders of his Nazi commanders during World War II. Today he is an old man living outside Boston. For Max, who has discovered Prandus's identity by chance, killing him is not enough, because Prandus is already dying of cancer. How can Max make Prandus suffer exactly as Max himself did? Can Max bring himself to assassinate Prandus's children and grandchildren and make the old man watch his family die, as Max himself was forced to do? By the time defense attorney Abe Ringel enters the case, Max has carried out an astounding act of revenge, and America'sgreat Holocaust trial has begun: an explosive legal and moral struggle to find the light of justice within the darkness of human evil. With Max facing almost certain conviction, Ringel desperately tries to prove his actions we
This volume offers a new theoretical approach to the analysis of the law/revenge binary, and attempts to dismantle the common idea of revenge as lacking any legal, moral or rational dimension. In contrast, the book puts forward a model of a complex system of justice—which it terms 'vindicatory'—wherein vendetta constitutes an authorized action, the core of which does not (just) lie in vengeance but also in settlement procedures for peace—or 'composition.' The first part of the book ("Vindicatory Justice: Conceptual Analyses and Forerunners") seeks to identify the nature of vindicatory justice and to shed light on the structure of so-called vindicatory systems. In turn, the second part ("Mapping Vindicatory Justice") illustrates, using examples gathered from a range of sociolegal contexts, the dynamic relationship between composition and authorized revenge in vindicatory systems. Taken as a whole, the volume shows that applying a longue durée historical perspective to the study of revenge systems allows us to clearly recognize composition and authorized revenge as features of the same legal system, even though one of them may seem predominant (or more eye-catching) than the other in certain cultural settings.
A professor of social psychology explores the history of execution in America, weighing its social costs, discussing its potential benefits and problems, and building a new model for understanding the politics behind the death penalty.
