Michael Meranze is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia 1760-1835 (North Carolina, 1996), co-editor (with David Garland and Randall McGowen) of America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (NYU, 2011) and numerous essays on legal and intellectual history. He also co-edits the blog Remaking the University.