March for Life: Capital Punishment w/Corinna Lain, Law Professor Univ. of Richmond

March for Life Series: This is a four-part series that looks at the value of life through the various societal lenses of faith and politics.

If you were to ask your friends what countries are in the top 10 countries that execute their citizens, you would probably get very similar responses from each person you ask, and almost certainly America would not be one of them. Because when people think about countries that sponsor state executions, they rarely think about America. Instead, most people generally consider countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to be leading the way, and they're correct. But what would surprise you, as it did Will and Josh, is that America ranks in the top 10 (actually number six, just above Pakistan).

On this week's episode, we continue our March for Life series and speak with one of the leading constitutional voices on capital punishment, Professor Corinna Lain. Her ability to take a very complex, and controversial, issue and translate it into an easy-to-understand concept will have you think critically about the efficacy of this form of criminal justice. It will be impossible to walk away from this discussion without learning something, and we hope you enjoy our conversation!

Guest Bio:

Professor Corinna Barrett Lain is a constitutional law scholar who writes about the influence of extralegal norms on Supreme Court decisionmaking, with a particular focus on the field of capital punishment. Her scholarship, which often uses the lens of legal history, has appeared in the Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal, among other venues. Professor Lain is an elected member of the American Law Institute and received the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award in 2006. She is a former prosecutor and an Army veteran.