Waiting for Godot: Thinking About Criminal Law After Mass Incarceration

Authors

• Jonathan Simon Professor of Law,, University of California, Berkeley School of Law

First Page

2097

Abstract

This brilliant set of close observations and careful analyses on some of the most cutting-edge issues arising in criminal law and reform of the criminal-justice system arrives at a time of great uncertainty as to the direction of change in criminal justice in the United States. After roughly a decade of reform and a significant surge in social movements criticizing the excesses of policing and punishment, the national conversation around crime has shifted back toward fear and a preference for "tough" law-and-order policies. Each one of these essays is packed with a great deal of insight and detail about very different parts and tendencies within contemporary criminal justice. I hope it will not distract from the insight of these essays to offer some comments that read across the contributions and out into the broader moment they inform. There is, in my reading, a poignant sense in these contributions of dwelling on and thinking about criminal law in a state of epistemological doubts and uncertainty about the future that is reminiscent of the post-World War II writings of existentialist writers and philosophers like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Recommended Citation

Jonathan Simon Professor of Law,, Waiting for Godot: Thinking About Criminal Law After Mass Incarceration, 78 Vanderbilt Law Review 2097 (2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol78/iss6/11