Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump and his allies have repeatedly threatened to use conspiracy laws against liberal groups, protesters, and political opponents. These threats reflect a troubling trend: prosecutors are exploiting the vague and expansive nature of conspiracy charges to attack the very relationships and forms of coordination that make social movements possible.
We reach into the vault and highlight some of our favorite posts on the entanglements between criminal law, political economy, and social inequality. Featuring Angela Harris, Noah Zatz, Jocelyn Simonson, Joanna Schwartz, Anthony O’Rourke, Guyora Binder, Rick Su, Zohra Ahmed, Dorothy Roberts, Judah Schept, Andrew Crespo, and Amna Akbar.
Incarcerated workers are deeply embedded in the U.S. economy, yet they are excluded from basic labor protections and organizing rights. Traditional labor unions can and should bring these workers into the fold by organizing across prison walls and redefining the boundaries of worker solidarity.
The history of Check It, a Black LGBTQ+ safety network in D.C., demonstrates that when the state criminalizes survival, community empowerment becomes the most vital form of resistance.
An expert on the history of mass incarceration explains why the Black incarceration rate was lower in the South than in the North for much of the 20th century, why recent decades have witnessed rising class inequality in prison admission rates, and why functionalist explanations of incarceration often cloud our scholarly and political thinking.
As neoliberal attacks on progressive taxation emptied public coffers, states and municipalities increasingly turned to fines and fees to generate revenue. More fundamentally, criminal punishment became a necessary correlate to a state that must enforce property rights against an ever-growing multitude.
The most common argument in favor of electronic monitoring in the criminal and immigration systems is that, even with its drawbacks and punitive features, monitoring is better than incarceration. While sometimes appropriate, this rationale is frequently deployed in problematic ways — on the basis of faulty reasoning and to the detriment of those whom it purportedly benefits.
Formal and informal associations in prisons are vital providers of food, financial support, physical security, education, news, legal representation, and more. The volume and scope of associations in prisons lay bare the diversity and extremity of needs that the state fails to meet, while also suggesting shortcomings with a patchwork approach by civil society for providing for critical public needs.
Municipal liability insurers have often unrecognized incentives to discourage reforms aimed at reducing police misconduct. For insurers, the predictability of losses is more important than the level of losses. This means that they are likely to oppose democratic reforms that create uncertainty and make it difficult to price the risks of police misconduct.
That public defense is in a state of crisis is far from controversial. Crushing caseloads and rampant underfunding have created untenable working conditions under which even the most well-meaning defenders often struggle to effectively represent their clients. And yet, Jocelyn Simonson, in her important new book Radical Acts of Justice, identifies a deeper, more existential crisis facing public defense — not one of funding, but of purpose.
With the spring submission season nearly in the books, we highlight some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering antitrust, legal theory, climate change, religion, disability, labor, consumer protection, criminal law, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
The activists depicted in Radical Acts of Justice challenge the idea that criminal prosecutors represent “the People.” But where did that idea come from in the first place? By tracing the long shift in American history from informal, non-professional law enforcement to our current system of formal, bureaucratized law enforcement, we can better understand the terrain on which contemporary popular justice movements are waging their struggles.
The most important work of legal scholarship in some time, Jocelyn Simonson’s Radical Acts of Justice raises, but does not develop, two major sets of questions. The first concerns the role of the Constitution in freedom struggles; the second, the legitimate role (if any) of violence in transformative left politics in the United States.
At times, the possibility of aligning our formal systems of justice with our normative aspirations appears almost inconceivable. Yet we can locate some faith in justice and democracy by looking to the concrete acts of collective care taking place all around us. In this post, Jocelyn Simonson kicks off a symposium on her recent book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration.
The heuristic of non-reformist reform can help avoid ultra-leftism and create the possibilities for coalition, such as across groups who care about transparency. It can help us salvage the transformative potential of demands that seem to have lost their teeth. But to realize these ends without falling back into reformist pieties, the framework demands rigorous, context-specific thinking that eschews dogmatism.
