This MCLR+ Book Forum 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.
David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: On the Present and Future of the Punishment and Society Research Agenda
José A. Brandariz & Patricia Faraldo-Cabana
Understanding Leviathan Today: Time to Bring in Immigration
Katja Franko
Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: Sources of Moderation Outside the Penal System
Rocío Lorca
How to Explain an Outlier? Reflections on Law and Order Leviathan
Sara Wakefield
Concepts, Comparisons, Conjunctures: Reflections on Law and Order Leviathan
David Garland
► In preparation for this Forum, MCLR+ hosted a book panel, live streamed on our YouTube channel, on April 14, 2026. The video of that event is available here; the audio is accessible here, or on any of the usual podcast outlets (Spotify, Apple, etc.).
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