My research agenda marshals resources from critical political theory and contemporary prison and police abolitionism to interrogate and reimagine the relation between law, politics, and community. 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.
Situated at the intersection of legal theory, social movement studies, carceral studies, and contemporary critical political and social theory, my dissertation project and book manuscript, An Abolitionist Theory of Law, elaborates the theoretical basis for this reconceptualization. To abolish police and prisons—law’s paradigmatic modes of enforcement—might seem to render law deficient, unable to intervene affirmatively in the world. However, reading abolitionist institutional experiments in mutual aid, community safety, and accountability as forms of grassroots law-making, I show how this seeming problem is in fact an abolitionist theory of law’s distinctive virtue. By providing a site to collectively generate, contest, revise, and celebrate common principles and default protocols without determining what must happen because of them in concrete cases, law can facilitate political action and political community beyond formal command and violent fiat—the conditions under which such action and such community can optimally thrive.
The first three chapters of the manuscript place influential abolitionist voices in dialogue with themes from legal and political theory. 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 what I call the “fugitive legal present.” By this, I mean the moment for action that law might animate through precedent and vision, but avoid determining through enforcement. The second chapter considers 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 then considers the pragmatics of law on an abolitionist theory. It turns to abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore to argue that an abolitionist theory of law, being compatible with a variety of orientations to the state, might unite anarchist and socialist variants of abolitionism under a single theoretical banner. At the same time, it might provide an effective means for abolitionists to navigate the state in practice. Each of these chapters has been presented—sometimes more than once—at major professional conferences, including the annual conferences of the Western Political Science Association; the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and the Law and Society Association.
Future work on the manuscript will place the theoretical insights from these chapters into more sustained conversation with concrete practices from the empirical world of abolitionist politics, varying in the extent of their connection to familiar legal forms. One chapter will consider 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. Another chapter will read 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 a constitutional document of legal founding. A final chapter will analyze abolitionist accountability processes in the aftermath of harm as paradigmatic articulations and navigations of the aforementioned “fugitive legal present,” which I place at the heart of an abolitionist theory of law.
If the manuscript concerns an abolitionist rethinking of the category of law, my other work places abolitionist ideas in more direct proximity to existing law and legal theory. 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. Another paper, in preparation for submission, 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. I look forward to expanding on both of these analyses in future writing.
