The Political Economy of Conservatorship
Abstract Conservatorship, though viewed as a private law device, has always operated as a tool of public governance, social control, and resource extraction through the manipulation of the legal category of disability. This Article places a well-accepted Anglo-American history of conservatorship in probate law in conversation with its historical deployment by states, the federal government, and...
Crowdsourcing Surveillance
Abstract In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Devon W. Carbado illuminates how both the spectacular and quotidian forms of racialized terror, brutality, and surveillance—characteristic of enslavement—have shaped the construction of our constitutional order. He argues that the combined social normalization and legal naturalization of racial hierarchy paved the way...
It’s Structural, Not Personal: Disrupting the Fallacy That Renders the Court “Unreasonably” Blind to the Meaning of Color in Policing
Abstract Unreasonable makes a number of important contributions to discourses on race, crime and justice. First, a central claim of the book is that within policing, race discrimination is not an individual phenomenon or a problem of bad police officers. Rather, bias is seamlessly built in to policing practices, training, accountability policies, and judicial approaches to evaluating police...
Why Public Health Approaches to Policing Matter
Abstract What can public health frameworks tell us about the causes of police brutality and possible remedies? Devon W. Carbado’s book Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment offers compelling insight into how understanding law as a determinant of the poor health outcomes associated with policing might create new pathways for rethinking the ways that law authorizes...
The Morphing of the Fourth Amendment Into the Anti-Thirteenth Amendment
A Move Toward Abolitionist Horizons? A Review of Devon W. Carbado’s Unreasonable
Abstract Abolition captured national attention in 2020 following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Despite this attention, stakeholders favoring traditional legal reforms remain skeptical about the abolitionist demand to gradually eliminate police and prisons. Abolitionists, in contrast, have sought to identify how the Constitution can be interpreted to create a society that...
Criminal Procedure in a Time of Abolition
Abstract As the ranks of prison industrial complex abolitionists grow, the question of whether, and if so how, they should engage with criminal procedure doctrine becomes ever more pressing. This Essay engages Devon W. Carbado’s Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment’s interrogation of whether to “blame” Chief Justice Warren for the expansion of the carceral state...