"Markel, Collins, and Leib have achieved a singular feat of scholarly analysis. Not only have they brought into sharp focus a previously unremarked set of inter-related policies affecting the family. They have also irrefutably proven those policies to be in deep conflict with one another and with the most fundamental tenets of our criminal justice system. The book will provoke thought. And it will ultimately impel reform. Wow."
—Dan Kahan,
Yale Law School
"This path-breaking work should be regarded as a major scholarly achievement even by those who disagree with some of the authors' normative conclusions. They have fundamentally re-imagined the domain where family law intersects with criminal law, moving us well beyond the intractable debates over law enforcement responses to domestic violence and identifying many promising new directions for research. Their work here is both innovative and meticulous, and other scholars will doubtlessly mine its insights for many years to come."
—Michael O'Hear,
Marquette University Law School
"Behind America's amazingly punitive penal policies lies a strong cultural fixation with the criminal law as a barrier between stranger danger and the putatively warm and safe world of the family. But as the authors of this strikingly original book reveal, this myth belies a complex web of doctrines that few will recognize from either our treatises or television serials. Viewed together for the first time, these doctrines frequently exhibit a bizarre patchwork of undue leniency, harshness, and discrimination — a pattern the authors effectively expose as inconsistent with our legal values."
—Jonathan Simon,
UC Berkeley School of Law, Author of Governing Through Crime (Oxford 2007)
"This boldly original book takes on the astonishingly under-examined subject of the explicit and conscious connections drawn between our criminal law institutions and the family. With scrupulousness and balance, Privilege or Punish examines and critiques our laws governing an array of intersections between crime, punishment and the family. The proposals the authors make in response are rigorous, provocative and thoughtful. Privilege or Punish should occupy an enduring place on both the criminal law and family law sides of our legal education and discourse."
—Robert Weisberg,
Stanford Law School
"Markel, Collins & Leib have made an extraordinarily thoughtful and nuanced contribution to criminal and family law."
—Roderick M. Hills, Jr.,
New York University School of Law
