Murray on "Punishment and the Costs of Knowledge"

Yxta Murray (Loyola Law School Los Angeles) has posted "Punishment and the Costs of Knowledge," which is scheduled to appear in an anthology of essays dedicated to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Four Courts Press, 2014). The abstract on SSRN reads as follows:

A too-bookish law professor doesn't know if literature has helped refine her position on the death penalty, or just turned her into an insufferable snob: An essay on elitism, bibliomania, confusion, and capital punishment.

When Professor Murray contacted us about this essay, we asked whether she had a fuller abstract. She sent back the following text, which both previews the content of the essay (Heaney's poem "Punishment" (1975) is a jumping-off point) and meditates on the scholarly practice of writing an abstract ("What is an abstract, anyway?"):
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