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Laura Weinrib, The Taming of Free Speech: America's Civil Liberties Compromise, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 461. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-674-54571-7).

ultimate constitutional authority to pardon, however, as well as day-to-day decision making power in cases involving the death penalty. Although New York has since abolished capital punishment, governors in several states retain this ultimate power over life and death, one way in which modern penology rests on premodern forms. No less than monarchy, perhaps, the modern state derives sovereign authority not solely from the power to punish but also from the power to absolve. Strange draws on 8,000 recently opened clemency case files, along with parole hearing transcripts, gubernatorial messages, legislative proceedings, and the reports of citizens’ watchdog groups. Throughout, she provides nuanced discussions of how race, class, and gender shaped decision making, although many of these findings are unsurprising (when seeking clemency, it has always helped to have wealthy supporters, although there are no guarantees). Strange uncovers intriguing pockets of surprise, however. Befitting her larger critique of Foucauldian accounts, she notes that Progressive Era expert taxonomies of “sexual psychopathy” made little initial impact on parole boards, who displayed remarkable nonchalance about granting early release to prisoners convicted of sex offenses. Little moved by the fat folders of psychiatric diagnoses that increasingly landed on his desk, one parole board chairman explained in 1926 that he placed more stock in “the appearance of the man” (192). At a moment of growing interest in the historical origins of the “carceral state,” Strange notes that there are more histories of punishment than of mercy; one hopes that Discretionary Justice will inspire more of both.