Notions of punishment and justice

A two-day USC conference in late April explored Austin Sarat’s Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty. “Execution, Spectacle, Law: A symposium on capital punishment with Austin Sarat” was organized by the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, the Program in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, the Faculty Workshop of the Gould School of Law and the Department of English and was hosted at USC’s Gould School of Law. Professor Sofia Gruskin, associate director of the USC Program on Global Health & Human Rights, along with professors Jody Armour (USC Gould School of Law) and Peggy Kamuf (French and Italian and Comparative Literature at USC), responded to a presentation by Sarat. Professor Gruskin offered a health and rights perspective to the discussion of capital punishment in the United States.