This is the first post in our series on Money Bail. Click here to read all posts in the series.  It is no longer controversial to say that our current system of money bail is flawed. When more than 400,000 people are incarcerated pretrial at any one time—a majority there because they cannot afford the amount…

This post is part of an ongoing series on LPE & Social Movements. In this moment of crisis for the rule of law, a number of thinkers on the left have prescribed new strategies for progressives to shift reigning ideas about constitutionalism and the law. Jedediah Purdy, for example, has argued that part of the…

This post opens a series on LPE & Social Movements. When members of the Sunrise Movement confronted Senator Dianne Feinstein ten days ago, they demonstrated the renewed vitality of an old force in democratic politics: organized young people bringing bold new visions to complex social problems. In the video, we see the power of movement…

The customary case caption in criminal court, “The People v. Defendant,” pits the community against one lone person in an act of collective condemnation. When I was a public defender in New York City, it was common for judges, clerks, and other courtroom players to refer to individual Assistant District Attorneys as “the People,” as…

Energized and challenged by the rise of powerful grassroots movements in the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, law professors are rethinking how to teach first-year Criminal Law. At the Law and Society Association annual meeting this summer, Alice Ristroph convened a group to ask “Are we teaching what we should be teaching? .…

A few years ago, we got together to consider how to teach differently in the “movement moment” provoked by the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions. We felt a particular sense of urgency given that the movements of our day—the Movement for Black Lives, #Not1More, #IdleNoMore, #Fightfor15, Occupy—have at the center of their critique our system of…