Karl Shoemaker

I am a legal historian, specializing in pre-modern European legal traditions. I am particularly interested in the history of criminal law and the historical development of legal and political institutions concerned with punishment, dispute settlement, and social control. My research also ranges more broadly into the development of the western legal tradition, with an eye toward comparing developments in English and Roman law. My first book, Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500 (Fordham University Press, 2011) won the John Nicholas Brown book prize from the Medieval Academy of America. I am currently working on a monograph that examines the legal career of the devil in pre-modern Europe.

I teach upper level undergraduate and graduate history courses. I also teach undergraduate courses in the Legal Studies Program and the Sociology Department, and occasionally in the Law School.

I was previously on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History, and was the incoming president of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. I was also a member of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Undergraduate Education.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
J.D., Cumberland School of Law
B.A., Liberty University

Books

A Global History of Crime and Punishment Volume 2: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age

Karl Shoemaker (Editor). A Global History of Crime and Punishment Volume 2: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2023.

What constituted a crime 2,500 years ago, and how was criminal activity dealt with? How has our definition of justice evolved over time alongside developments in law, society, religion and class structures? 36 experts address these pressing questions in a six-volume reference set that spans 2,500 years of human history. Integrating perspectives from history, cultural studies, philosophy and classics, this globally-focused work traces developments in the ever-changing criminal and justice worlds against a variety of social, legal and cultural contexts. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes cover: 1. Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 CE); 2. Medieval Age (800 – 1450); 3. Renaissance (1450 – 1650) ; 4. Age of Enlightenment (1650 – 1800); 5. Age of Empire (1800 – 1920); 6. Modern Age (1920 – 2000+). Themes include crime, types of criminal, law enforcement, sanctions and representations of crime and punishment. The page extent is approximately 1,728 pp. with c. 300 illustrations. Each volume opens with notes on contributors, a series preface and an introduction, and concludes with notes, bibliography and an index. Table of Contents Volume 1: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in Antiquity Edited by Adriaan Lanni, Harvard Law School, USA Volume 2: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Medieval Age Edited by Karl Shoemaker, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA Volume 3: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Renaissance Edited by Laura Stokes, Stanford University, USA Volume 4: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Xavier Rousseaux, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium Volume 5: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Age of Empire Edited by Mark Finnane, Griffith University, Australia Volume 6: A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Modern Age Edited by Paul Lawrence, The Open University, UK

Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject

Karl Shoemaker. Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject. University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

How do we select those who will be subject to capital punishment? How do we identify the worst of the worst and decide who among them can and should be executed? Today these questions are more pressing than they have ever been. As the number of people sentenced to death and executed declines in the United States, those who are executed stand out as distinctive kinds of criminals, distinctive kinds of people. Does a death sentence affirm or deny their humanity? Is such a sentence an act of revenge or a carefully calculated act of justice? These are more than questions for policy and law. They are one way of getting a handle on how our culture understands what makes life worth preserving and of delving into its complex calculus of punishment and retribution. Who Deserves to Die? brings together a distinguished group of death penalty scholars to assess the forms of legal subjectivity and legal community that are supported and constructed by the doctrines and practices of punishment by death in the United States. They help us understand what we do and who we become when we decide who is fit for execution.

Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500

Karl Shoemaker. Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500. Fordham University Press, 2011.

Sanctuary and Crime rethinks the history of sanctuary protections in the Western legal tradition. Until the sixteenth century, every major medieval legal tradition afforded protections to fugitive criminals who took sanctuary in churches. Sanctuary-seeking criminals might have been required to perform penance or go into exile, but they were guaranteed, at least in principle, immunity from corporal and capital punishment. In the sixteenth century, sanctuary protections were abolished throughout Europe, uprooting an ancient tradition and raising a new set of juridical arguments about law, crime and the power to punish. Sanctuary law has not received very much scholarly attention. According to the prevailing explanation among earlier generations of legal historians, sanctuary was an impediment to effective criminal law and social control, but was made necessary by rampant violence and weak political order in the medieval world. Contrary to the conclusions of the relatively scant literature on the topic, Sanctuary and Crime argues that the practice of sanctuary was not simply an instrumental device intended as a response to weak and splintered medieval political authority. Nor can sanctuary laws be explained as simple ameliorative responses to harsh medieval punishments and the specter of uncontrolled blood-feuds. This book seeks to integrate the history of sanctuary law with the history of criminal law in medieval Europe. It does so by first situating sanctuary law within the early Christian traditions of intercession and penance as well as late-imperial Roman law. The book then traces the transmission of Romano-Christian sanctuary legislation into the feuding traditions of early medieval Europe, showing how sanctuary law was an important emblem of Christian kingship and was integrated into a broad range of social, legal, ecclesiastical and political practices. By the late twelfth-century, sanctuary had been domesticated within the procedures of royal law in England. Unmoored from its taproots in penitential and intercessory practices, sanctuary became a central feature of the emergent law of felony in the early English common law. While sanctuary was widely recognized throughout late medieval Europe, medieval English records provide rich accounts of sanctuary in everyday medieval life and the book reflects the prominence of the English sources. The book concludes by examining the legal arguments in both English and Roman-canonical legal traditions that led to the restriction and abolition of sanctuary privileges in the sixteenth-century and which ushered in a new age of criminal law grounded in deterrence and a state-centered view of punishment and social control.

Selected Publications

• “Wrong: Toward a Cultural History of a Medieval Legal Concept” in A Cultural History of Law in the Middle Ages, eds. Laurent Mayali and Emanuele Conte (Bloomsbury Press, 2018), pp. 113-124.
• “Germanic Law” in The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, eds. Heikki Pilhajamäki, Markus Dubber, and Mark Godfrey (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 249-264
• “Medieval Canon Law,” in The Oxford Handbook of Legal History, eds. Markus Dubber and Christopher Tomlins (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 681-694.
• “The Clerk William Tyssyngton and the Pursuit of Fugitives in the Late Thirteenth Century,” in Law and Society in Later Medieval England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of Paul Brand, ed. Travis Baker (Routledge, 2018) pp. 109-119.
• “The King’s Two Bodies as Lamentation,” 13 Journal of Law Culture and Humanities, 24-35 (2017).
• “The Great Charter Turned 800: Remembering Its 700^th Birthday,” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, 25:499-512 (2016).
• “The King’s Two Bodies as Lamentation,” Journal of Law Culture and Humanities (forthcoming 2015), pp. 1-15.
• Regarding Untimeliness: Medieval Legal History and Modern Law,” Critical Analysis of Law: An International and Interdisciplinary Law Review 2 (2015) pp. 199-213.
• “The Devil at Law in the Middle Ages” (“Le Diable et le droit au Moyen Âge”) Revue de l’histoire des religion 228 (2011) 567-586.
• “The Medieval Origins of the Supreme Court’s Prohibition on Executing the Insane,” in Who Deserves to Die?: Constructing the Executable Subject, eds. Austin Sarat and Karl Shoemaker (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2011).

Advisor To:

• Selenay Aydin
• Sara Paris
• Mallory Moss

History Courses

• History 426 – The History of Punishment
• History 459 – The Rule of Law: Historical and Philosophical Models – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 550 – Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies in Medieval Civilization
• History 550 – Medieval Law and Society – Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History 600 – Law and the Sacred in the Middle Ages – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 720 – Proseminar in Medieval History
• History 805 – Seminar in Medieval History