BOOK REVIEW (2020) Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial (trans. Lara Vergnaud), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s ‘Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial’ is a tour de force into the criminal trial’s symbolic economy, violence and political logic.1 The starting point is the consideration that the courtroom is a ‘magnifying glass of our inscription within the legal order and our submission to its authority’ (p. 13) and deciphering its nature and functions equates with uncovering our condition as legal-political subjects. From this angle, the book pursues three interlinked aims: to demystify, in a Bourdieusian sense, the trial’s self-enforcing perceptual frame- works (how the trial construes reality), to expose its bare violence (how it forces people to be something else from ‘what they are’) and to denounce and contest its political rationale (how it instantiates our position as political-legal subjects). Finally, the book provides a ‘left-libertarian’ (p. 19) and rather counterintuitive alternative to the trial’s violence.