Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Justice Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is author or editor of more than seventy books, including When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition; Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyers (with Stuart Scheingold); The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society; and most recently The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States (with Charles Ogletree, Jr). Sarat is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and of Studies in Law, Politics and Society. In 2009 he received the Stan Wheeler Award from the Law and Society Association for distinguished teaching and mentoring. Jürgen Martschukat is a Professor of History at Erfurt University. He was formerly an Assistant Professor at Hamburg University (1993–2001) and recipient of the opus magnum-fellowship of the German 'pro-humanities' foundation. He has published several books, edited volumes, and numerous articles on the history of violence and the death penalty in Europe and the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. In 2002, he was awarded the David Thelen Prize from the Organization of American Historians for his article on the 'Art of Killing by Electricity'. In 2007, he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, working on a project on race and capital punishment.