My research agenda coheres around a core question: what are the political possibilities for law and legal form in a time of crisis for the liberal state? Situated at the intersection of legal theory, social movement studies, carceral studies, and contemporary political theory, my dissertation project and book manuscript, An Abolitionist Theory of Law, motivates this problematic and articulates the theoretical basis for such a reimagination. Abolitionist politics and thinking, I contend, provides a corrective to the “enforcement compulsion”—the symptomatic conflation between legal substance and the right or even obligation to exercise force on its behalf—that bedevils modern legal theories and legal orders. Commonplace understandings tend to place law and abolition at odds: the former is often figured as an apparatus of sovereign enforcement and the latter as that apparatus’s wholesale rejection. Against both of these assumptions, my work shows how abolitionism offers a way to think law differently, that is, as a capacity open to groups of all kinds and an enabling condition for political action and collective life. 

The manuscript begins with an introduction that traces the ways modern legal theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Jürgen Habermas have imagined the relationship between law, politics, and violence. I claim that the emancipatory and critical aspirations of each of these thinkers and the traditions they helped spawn have foundered on what I call the “enforcement compulsion”—the presumed automatic relationship between legal content and physical violence on its behalf—and that abolitionist thinking offers legal theory a way to transcend this compulsion. The first three substantive chapters of the manuscript then turn to influential abolitionist voices to make good on this promise. The first chapter considers the form of law on an abolitionist theory by examining the surprising reception of the legal theorist Robert M. Cover in the work of abolitionist and Black Studies scholar Fred Moten, reading both with and against Hannah Arendt. There, I argue that “law” might, in an abolitionist reconsideration, be thought of as the principles and protocols of any self-conscious political collective, brought to bear freely and indeterminately by actors in concrete instances where the commitments they house are at stake. The second chapter asks about the purpose of law on an abolitionist theory, reading abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba, critical legal scholar Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Walter Benjamin together to argue that law, in an abolitionist reimagination, might serve to animate and concretize institutional experiments in anti-carceral life. The third chapter concerns the pragmatics of law on an abolitionist theory. It interprets Gilmore’s category of “human sacrifice”—frequently invoked as the precise evil abolition seeks to eliminate— in order to draw out normative principles that might distinguish acceptable from unacceptable coercion in the name of law. Research for this chapter has contributed to an article, currently under review at Contemporary Political Theory, and Gilmore’s use of metaphors from dramatic theater and its relation to an abolitionist theory of order. 

The next two chapters then place the theoretical insights from these chapters into more sustained conversation with concrete practices from the world of abolitionist politics. The fourth chapter reads the 2001 “INCITE!-Critical Resistance Statement on Gender Violence,” produced by two organizations outlining principles of unity for feminist anti-violence and prison abolitionist movements, as an event of abolitionist “constituent power,” and a constitutional document for contemporary abolitionist organizing.  The fifth chapter then considers the possibilities and limits of an analogy between an abolitionist approach to law and the sphere of international law, which is also not enforced through traditional means. I will draw out this analysis in reference to a case study: the shadow report Chicago grassroots youth organization We Charge Genocide submitted to the UN Committee Against Torture in 2014 as part of a city-wide campaign for justice for survivors of police torture that is often celebrated by abolitionists. A concluding chapter then considers the value of an abolitionist theory of law in a reactionary climate like our own, where an emboldened far right administration conducts its own attempt to transform the fundamental terms of liberal legal order. 

My other work furthers this interest in the implications of radical critiques of enforcing violence for legal and political thought. In an article published in The Journal of Law and Political Economy—based on an essay that took 2nd place in the 2021 Law and Political Economy Writing Prize competition—I analyze American penal law and penal culture through the lens of Marxist theories of commodity fetishism, paying particular attention to how what I call “commodified justice” interacts in with racism. Building on this interest in law, ideology, and enforcement, I am presently composing an article—to be presented at the 2025 APSA meeting—that seeks to problematize the binary between law’s use of force and law’s traffic in ideological domination, drawing on Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, Robert Cover, and Carl Schmitt. Another paper, in preparation for submission and informing aspects of An Abolitionist Theory of Law's concluding chapter, concerns the relationship between abolition and left legal paradigms such as Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Law and Political Economy, and argues for the irreducible relevance of abolition to a thoroughgoing critique of liberal legalism.