Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence Political Science at Amherst College and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and JD from Yale Law School. He is former President of the Law and Society Association; former President of the Association for the Study of the Law, Culture and the Humanities; and President of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs. He is author or editor of more than fifty books, including Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution; When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition; Something to Believe in: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyers (with Stuart Scheingold); and The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, amongst many others. Sarat is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and of Studies in Law, Politics and Society. His public writing has appeared in such places as the Los Angeles Times and the American Prospect, and he has been a guest on National Public Radio, The News Hour, Odyssey, The Abrams Report on MSNBC, World News Tonight on ABC, and The O'Reilly Factor. His teaching has been featured in the New York Times and on The Today Show. In 1997, Sarat received the Harry Kalven Award given by the Law Society Association for distinguished research on law and society. In 2004, he received the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Award, given biennially to honor the best scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice. It was given in recognition of his work on cause lawyering and the three books he has produced on the subject. In 2006, the Association for the Study of Law Culture and the Humanities awarded him the James Boyd White Prize for distinguished scholarly achievement in recognition of his 'innovative and outstanding' work in the humanistic study of law.

Jurgen 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.