Dead Certainty is about the challenge of judging matters of public
concern without a common sense of the good or other shared criteria that
validate final decisions. Examining both the philosophical and the
practical aspects of this challenge, this book focuses on United States
Supreme Court opinions that authorize and regulate the practice of
sentencing people to death. Unlike other books that discuss capital
punishment, it does not argue for or against the death penalty. Instead,
Dead Certainty contributes to a larger project in contemporary
political and legal philosophy: re-imagining how people in today's world
give coherence and meaning to their shared experience. Culbert's work
will be of interest to scholars of political theory, jurisprudence, law
and society, rhetoric, continental philosophy, and ethics.