Rate My Professor David Garland

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University Faculty of Arts and Science. Widely considered one of the world's leading scholars of crime and punishment, he specializes in the sociology of penal institutions, social control mechanisms, the welfare state, and criminological theory. Garland earned his LL.B. with first-class honors in 1977 and Ph.D. in socio-legal studies in 1984 from the University of Edinburgh, along with an M.A. in criminology in 1978 from the University of Sheffield. His research explores historical and cultural aspects of punishment, the American death penalty, legal institutions of control, the history and sociology of criminological knowledge, social solidarity, social theory, and the work of Michel Foucault.

Garland's academic career began at the University of Edinburgh Faculty of Law, where he served as lecturer from 1979 to 1990, reader from 1990 to 1992, and personal chair from 1992 to 1997. Since 1997, he has been at New York University, appointed Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law in 2001. He has held distinguished visiting positions, including Shimizu Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in 2014, McK. Brown Visiting Chair in Law at the University of British Columbia in 2013, and Honorary Professor at Edinburgh Law School. Key publications include Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (1985), 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), The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (2025). His contributions have garnered major awards, including the Edwin H. Sutherland Award and Michael J. Hindelang Award (both 2012, American Society of Criminology), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2006-2007), Sellin-Glueck Prize (1993), fellowships in the British Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and honorary doctorates from the Free University of Brussels (2009), University of Oslo (2017), and University of Edinburgh (2025). Garland founded and served as editor-in-chief of Punishment & Society (1997-2001) and holds positions on multiple editorial boards.