Professor David Garland
Honorary Professor
David Garland, a graduate of Edinburgh University Law School (LLB 1977; PhD 1984), is considered one of the world’s leading scholars of crime and punishment. He is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. His award-winning books include Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (1985 and 2018); Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (1990); The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (2001); Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010); and The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (2016).
Professor Garland is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was Davis Fellow at Princeton University and a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow. He was Shimizu Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in 2014, an Astor Lecturer at Oxford University in 2016, a visiting fellow at Sydney University Law School in 2022. His work has been recognised through the award of doctorates honoris causa by the Free University of Brussels (2009), Oslo University (2017) and the University of Edinburgh (2025), and by the 2012 American Society of Criminology Edwin H. Sutherland Prize for outstanding contributions to theory and research.
His current work focuses on comparative and structural explanations of America’s distinctive use of policing and punishment and on the genealogy of the idea of the “welfare state” in British political discourse. His latest book, entitled Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment will be published by Princeton University Press in autumn 2025.
