Apr 8, 2026 Maartje van der Woude
There is a tendency in socio-legal and criminological scholarship to approach border policing through its most visible moments: the violent encounter, the discretionary stop, the dramatic deportation, the spectacular failure or abuse. Irene Vega’s Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality invites us to look elsewhere. Not away from power or harm, but toward the quieter, routinized, and morally ambiguous labor through which immigration enforcement is sustained day after day. It is here, Vega shows, that the U.S. immigration system derives much of its resilience, and much of its cruelty.
Based on extensive ethnographic interviews with Border Patrol agents and ICE deportation officers, the book offers a deeply textured account of how frontline immigration agents come to understand their work, their authority, and themselves. Vega is not interested in asking whether agents are “good” or “bad.” Instead, she asks a more unsettling question: how do agents learn to live with, justify, and normalize a system that produces suffering on such a vast scale?
The answer, Vega argues, lies in the cultivation of indifference: not apathy or callousness, but a carefully managed moral stance that allows agents to do their jobs while keeping moral dissonance at bay. Indifference, in this sense, is not the absence of feeling but a form of moral work. It is actively produced, sustained, and legitimated through institutional routines and legal authority.
For U.S. lawyers, this insight is particularly arresting. Vega shows that indifference is not simply an occupational coping mechanism, but a stance enabled by law itself. Legal mandates, procedural routines, and chains of authority allow agents to experience their actions as lawful even when they are morally troubling. In this way, Bordering on Indifference is as much a study of legality as it is of enforcement culture: it reveals how law operates as a moral alibi, converting ethically fraught decisions into neutral acts of compliance.
From the outset, Vega situates immigration enforcement as a profoundly moral field. Agents are not only law enforcers; they are moral actors operating within a system whose legitimacy is constantly contested. In the book’s opening chapters, she traces how agents “take the job” and “become agents,” often drifting into immigration enforcement for pragmatic reasons—economic stability, limited local opportunities, or proximity to the border—rather than ideological commitment to immigration restriction. Yet once inside the institution, agents are trained to see migration through a law-and-order lens that frames enforcement as both necessary and underappreciated.
This process of professional socialization is crucial. As Vega shows, the academy does not merely teach legal rules and tactical skills; it reshapes recruits’ moral vocabularies. Agents learn to understand themselves as enforcement-oriented professionals tasked with controlling a problem that is at once politically charged, structurally irresolvable, and deeply racialized. The result is a persistent sense of futility, of “doing a job you are not allowed to do”, paired with a strong attachment to the authority of law as a moral anchor.
That attachment should give legal scholars pause. Vega’s analysis reveals how legality functions not only as a constraint on power, but as a source of moral reassurance for those who exercise it. Agents repeatedly return to law—this is what the law requires; this is not my decision—as a way of resolving moral doubt. For lawyers accustomed to viewing legality as a safeguard against arbitrariness or abuse, the book offers a sobering counterpoint: here, law stabilizes coercion by dispersing responsibility across procedures, hierarchies, and rules.
One of the book’s central contributions lies in its analysis of Latina/o agents, whose racial and cultural proximity to migrants places them in an especially fraught moral position. Rather than treating shared ethnicity as a straightforward source of empathy or resistance, Vega shows how it becomes a resource for governance. In a key chapter, she introduces the concept of “caring control” to describe how some Latina/o agents use cultural familiarity, language, and courtesy to humanize enforcement encounters without altering their punitive outcomes.
Caring control, Vega argues, is not a contradiction but a technique: a form of soft coercion that improves compliance, reduces friction, and allows agents to see themselves as humane actors within an otherwise harsh system. Crucially, this humaneness does not disrupt the machinery of deportation. Instead, it stabilizes it, benefiting both agents, who can preserve a sense of moral worth, and the state, which gains legitimacy through a diverse and ostensibly compassionate workforce. Not all agents adopt this approach. Others embrace what Vega calls “disinterested professionalism,” insisting on neutrality, equal treatment, and emotional distance. Yet here too, the outcome is the same: the smooth reproduction of enforcement. Whether through warmth or detachment, the system moves forward.
The book’s analytical core emerges most forcefully in its chapters on moral ambiguity, denial, and legitimacy. Vega takes readers into moments where the moral scaffolding of enforcement threatens to collapse: the family apprehended in the desert, the father who begs to be released, the agent who recognizes himself in the migrant standing before him. These encounters generate what Vega calls “moral emotions” (sympathy, guilt, shame) that run counter to the enforcement mission.
What happens next is telling. Rather than producing resistance or refusal, these emotions are managed through denial. Agents deny responsibility (“I’m just enforcing the law”), deny harm (“I’m not hurting anyone”), or deny victimhood (“they chose this”). For legal audiences, this analysis resonates well beyond immigration enforcement. The familiar appeal to legality mirrors doctrinal and institutional logics that insulate individual actors from responsibility by locating agency elsewhere. In statutes, executive priorities, or bureaucratic necessity. Vega shows how these logics operate not only in courtrooms or policy debates, but in the everyday moral reasoning of frontline officials. The result is a system in which harm is legally authorized yet experientially disowned.
The final chapters extend this analysis to questions of legitimacy. Immigration agents, Vega shows, experience their work as morally tainted. They feel misrepresented by the media, criticized by the public, and—especially for Latina/o agents—accused of betraying their communities. In response, agents engage in active legitimation work: reframing deportees as criminals, invoking sovereignty and legality, and comparing U.S. enforcement favorably to that of other countries. Vega situates this frontline moral labor within broader political shifts. While changes in presidential administrations may alter enforcement priorities, they do not fundamentally disrupt the moral economy of immigration control. What remains constant is the everyday work of agents who translate abstract legal mandates into lived realities, often beyond the reach of public scrutiny or judicial review.
Bordering on Indifference makes several vital contributions. Empirically, it offers rare access to a closed and defensive institution. Theoretically, it advances our understanding of how morality, emotion, race, and legality operate together within bureaucratic power. Normatively, it resists easy judgments, forcing readers to confront the unsettling possibility that cruelty is most effectively sustained not by hatred or excess, but by professionalism, care, and moral distancing.
For U.S. lawyers in particular, Vega’s book offers a critical intervention. It challenges comfortable assumptions about the redemptive force of legality and raises difficult questions about responsibility, discretion, and accountability in administrative systems. It reminds us that some of the most consequential legal harms are produced not through overt illegality, but through ordinary compliance with law.
In an era where border violence is increasingly visible across the globe, Bordering on Indifference reminds us that the durability of the immigration system lies not only in walls and weapons, but in the everyday moral accommodations that make exclusion feel lawful, necessary, and ordinary.
Mar 25, 2026 Ji Seon Song
Over 3.6 million people are on some form of community supervision of either probation or parole. This is almost double the number of people incarcerated in juvenile facilities, jails, and prisons. The alternative to incarceration has now become its own beast, leading to the new coinage of mass supervision or mass probation. The problems with mass supervision and mass probation are many, as scholars have noted. Supervision in the community net-widens. It replicates and perpetuates racial inequality. Community supervision does not lead to a life free from the criminal legal system. Instead, people who are sentenced to probation and parole often cycle back into incarceration. Probation and parole expand the carceral footprint and do so in ways that infringe on the privacy, liberty, and dignity of lives, while also expanding law enforcement capabilities.
These criticisms implicitly include the actions of the agents of community supervision—probation and parole agents. But is there more to probation and parole than just supervision? As routine, embedded institutional actors who operate at the nexus of law enforcement, rehabilitator, counselor, and adjudicator, what other kinds of harms do they produce? This is where Renagh O’Leary’s work comes in. In the “new penology” described by Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley, with its emphasis on risk management and control of those deemed dangerous, the agents of community supervision are important arbiters of risk management and assessors of dangerousness. In two articles, Supervising Sentencing and Ideological Testing, O’Leary delves deeper into the processes of community supervision agents, looking beyond their purely supervisory functions. Each article is noteworthy for its individual contributions, but reading them together reveals additional insights and implications. O’Leary’s work uncovers probation and parole agents as important ideological actors contributing to the “ideology of criminal procedure.” These principles of criminal procedure frame the cultures and interactions between the criminal justice actors and the public, constituting “a set of ideas and assumptions that undergird the operation of the criminal process and legitimize the status quo.”
To make her arguments, O’Leary, a criminal law and procedure scholar, has amassed an impressive dataset of 200 internal probation policy documents, including standardized questionnaires, templates for presentence reports, and agency policies on presentence investigations and reports. She also draws from a collection of risk assessments and completed a risk assessment training herself.
In Supervising Sentencing, O’Leary examines the process of pre-sentence interviewing and report-writing by probation officers. Probation officers in nearly all jurisdictions are tasked with preparing a pre-sentence report for the sentencing judge. The report is preceded by a pre-sentence interview where the probation officer questions defendants on a wide range of topics, aimed at arriving at a sentence recommendation and providing relevant sentencing information to the court. O’Leary highlights three facets of this pre-trial report process: topic-selection, fact-finding, and meaning-making. In carrying out these discretionary functions, probation officers can ask if family members have criminal histories and obtain broad releases for otherwise private records. After gathering information, they then interpret the facts in highly “impressionistic and subjective ways” to opine on those facts, such as in assessing the defendant’s “attitude.” These choices have an “ideological dimension,” according to O’Leary. They help imbue a “punitive perspective” at sentencing that has “deep faith in the criminal system” as one that is socially beneficial. This elevation of the punitive perspective also benefits from the probation officers’ “pretense of neutrality and helps insulate it from challenge and critique.”
In Ideological Testing, O’Leary delves deeper into the concept of the ideology of criminal procedure. She surfaces a category of questioning by probation officers and parole agents in risk assessments, pre-sentence interviews, and parole hearings that reveal what she calls “ideological testing.” The ideology of criminal procedure O’Leary points to in Supervising Sentencing previews arguments she fleshes out in Ideological Testing. O’Leary highlights three sites of ideological testing: presentence investigations, risk assessments, and parole hearings. She identifies questions that “test” the ideology of criminal defendants with questions like “do you think the criminal justice system is fair?” or “How do you feel about the police who arrested you?” Even as inequities and injustices in the criminal legal system are well-documented, especially for Black defendants and defendants from other racial minority groups, the “wrong” answer to these questions is interpreted as evidence of criminality, lack of remorse, or refusal to accept responsibility. At its essence, the message of these questions to a defendant is: drink the Kool-Aid even if the Kool-Aid poisons you, or suffer the consequences. These questions reinforce the punitive perspective O’Leary defines in Supervising Sentencing: “one that sees the criminal legal system as just, criminal punishment as socially beneficial, and criminal defendants as moral failures.” More than that, the systematic use of these questions and assessments undermines free speech, perpetuates a kind of gaslighting by denying the defendant’s reality, and further entrenches racial injustice by disallowing criticism by defendants of the kinds of bias and discrimination that led to their arrests, prosecutions, pleas, and convictions.
O’Leary acknowledges that because her examination is limited to policies and protocols, she cannot opine on how individual officers approach cases. But in her framework of community supervision agents’ ideological work, we can see how these agents, as “street-level bureaucrats,” are yet another example of Michael Lipsky’s theory of how government workers deploy their discretion in ways that not only shape the experiences of individual defendants, but serve to legitimate perceptions of the system as a whole. Thinking about the process of ideological testing and pre-sentence investigating together reveals how they form a feedback loop for the stakeholders, producing a continuous survey confirming the fairness and legitimacy of the criminal legal process and system. This feedback loop tells community supervision agents and other criminal justice stakeholders that even criminal defendants consider the criminal legal system fair and believe that their cases did not involve bias, discrimination, the misuse of discretion, or missteps by police, prosecutors, judges, and public defenders. This message is perhaps even more potent because the perception of community supervision agents is that they are non-partisan and represent the softer or rehabilitating side of the criminal legal system.
As a former public defender and clinician, O’Leary is well-positioned to offer practical solutions. For instance, she outlines a First Amendment challenge to ideological testing in risk assessments. A separate approach she advocates for in both articles is the elimination of the identified processes of the pre-sentence interview and risk assessments. Perhaps such elimination might satisfy the issues she highlights, but I wonder whether it might be worth questioning the broader value of these community service agents and the institutions they represent, especially as more is uncovered about how much they execute managerial and behind-the-scenes functions of the criminal legal system that have wide-ranging consequences.
Ultimately, O’Leary’s work calls on scholars and advocates to think more deeply and with more nuance about the inner mechanisms of the often overlooked actors engaged in community supervision. What may appear to be the routine and inconsequential actions of these actors are actually powerful drivers of certain ideologies of our criminal legal system.
Feb 23, 2026 Jonathan Simon
In Franz Kafka’s haunting short story, Before the Law, an ordinary person (described as a “countryman”) seeks to enter the law only to discover a gatekeeper whose formidable personal presence and vague threats of even fiercer gatekeepers keep him stalled at the law’s entrance. The seeker spends his entire life imploring the gatekeeper to let him in, never daring to attempt to evade him. In the end, he comes to know (spoiler here) that this gate, from which he was denied entry, was made only for him.
Modern students of the legal system have long studied the role of gatekeepers, both the intermediaries like lawyers whose help is crucial to accessing justice, and institutional rules and norms that favor repeat players over first time users of the courts. Rarely, (but see, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Crook County (2016)), however, do we, like Kafka, explore the physical (and perhaps metaphysical) barriers to equal justice. In an important analysis of data from a broader ethnographic and qualitative interview based study of ordinary people’s experiences with accessing courts, Spatial Burdens of State Institutions: The Case of Criminal Courthouses, Matthew Clair, Jesus Orozco and Iris Zhang spotlight the spatial environments of court houses and how they contribute to complex patterns of inequality and paternalistic and punitive forms of poverty governance. The authors highlight two kinds of power effects of court spatial conditions. There is the direct effect on court users of the environment in and around the courthouse and how that can shape the emotional experience of accessing justice institutions. There is also a secondary effect when court-based burdens cause a person to have to seek additional state institutional intervention (like a person who loses their job because of the time involved in attending court hearings and must apply for unemployment or food support). Together, these create a distinctively spatial dimension to poverty governance.
The authors’ multiyear study focused on two courthouses in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, County, California). One was the main county courthouse in downtown San Jose (the largest city in the county and one of the largest in the state in terms of population and area), which is surrounded by high-speed roads and parking lots, and lacks nearby affordable restaurants. The other was the Palo Alto branch court, which sits in a high-income area full of stores, restaurants and amenities. The authors and their collaborators undertook two years of fieldwork and multiple interviews with court users in the period following the COVID 19 closures.
One feature of geographic variation around inequality that has long been of interest to social scientists and lawyers involves spatial distance. We speak routinely now of “food deserts” to describe the way poorer neighborhoods often lack access to affordable sources of healthy food (like larger grocery stores). This consideration is relevant to the courthouse story as well. For some defendants, especially those not in custody, and for their family members, the long distance and the lack of easy public transit across the county makes the Palo Alto courthouse a special burden. Likewise, in court studies, the rural/urban divide has often been spotlighted as capturing major disparities in the resources and infrastructures of justice (courthouses, lawyers, law enforcement). But objective distance and the rural urban divide is only one dimension of geographic power effects. The authors focus on four dimensions that emerge as significant from their interviews and ethnographic observations: functional distance (objective distance plus the various barriers like transit, parking, and traffic patterns); neighborhood social life (the way the collective built and social environment may be welcoming or unwelcoming); the exterior form of the courthouse (how it appears and how it can be entered); and interior built forms (interior barriers, aids to navigation or arrival, and complexity).
While the interviews included people involved in non-criminal proceedings, the significant effects were most concentrated on those in criminal cases, and even those involved in civil matters were more affected if they were already criminalized. The qualitative research surfaces many fascinating details that will be especially interesting to those teaching clinical and practice related courses involving predominantly poor communities and to those researching or teaching on criminal courts. The authors make many surprising findings, including that in-custody defendants have an easier path to court since they are generally brought close to the courtroom for their hearings and then escorted in. Some findings are not so surprising but nonetheless important. For example, disabled people face daunting obstacles downtown in high traffic wide streets and frequently broken elevators and doorways.
Several findings struck me as particularly interesting. The downtown San Jose courthouse, as is the case with many large city downtown courthouses and in some smaller cities, is located as part of a clustering of other carceral institutions. These clusters typically include a jail, the police headquarters, and sometimes additional federal jails or immigration detention facilities. This clustering means that persons—defendants out of custody, but also witnesses, victims, family members, or jurors—must confront institutions that may trigger deep trauma from past encounters. They also face real risks of being stopped, arrested, or deported while passing by. The presence of encampments of unhoused people, one of which was present near the downtown San Jose court house during the research period, and which can be found in many downtowns, carries its own package of potential triggering experiences, most notably exposure to drug use and sales for those who may already be under some kind of criminal supervision or are in recovery from drug addiction. The logics of creating carceral clusters are likely driven by land costs and urban development planning, but have unintended consequences for those who may experience, in the shadows or all those carceral institutions, something like a “carceral citizenship.”
Interior design and scale also matter. Large courthouses (downtown San Jose has 30 courtrooms) can be incredibly confusing to those who are first time users. This is compounded by hidden front entrances, long security lines that may snake in front of a courthouse, and lack of adequate signage for finding the right court room. Those assigned to a more suburban courthouse will find the entry to the building and related access issues like parking or bike access far easier, and restaurants more abundant, but may find the differences in class and racial make-up around the courthouse alienating. Inside, courtrooms are generally poorly designed to facilitate audio or visual access by the public (and sometimes even defendants) to the statements being made from the bench, by lawyers, or by court clerks. The resulting confusion and chaotic soundscape undoubtedly contribute to a sense of dehumanization.
At a time when much interest is generated by the creation of innovative new courts for defendants who are veterans, unhoused, or in need of mental health or substance abuse treatment, Spatial Burdens is a powerful reminder that the past will live on in the built environment, both around and inside the courthouse. Until we change those, the messages being sent by well-intended substantive reforms may be muddled at best. In the meantime, too many ordinary people will remain psychologically stalled before the gates of the law.
Jan 26, 2026 Darryl Brown
The United States imprisons about 1.8 million people—more than any other nation. Roughly a quarter of those behind bars have not been convicted; they are detained while awaiting a court hearing. The burden is not evenly distributed: the share of black men in prison is three times their share of the national population. What explains America’s commitment to spending so much to lock up so many? In her previous book, Prisoners of Politics (2019), Rachel Barkow put the blame squarely on the fact that U.S. criminal justice policy at every level—local, state, and federal—is made by politicians and voters rather than agencies informed insulated from political pressure and informed by expert analysis. The public perennially demands tough-on-crime policies. Legislators oblige by enacting ever-harsher laws. Elected prosecutors enforce those laws. Reforms won in recent years through politics—election of progressive prosecutors, bail reform, decriminalization of marijuana, and modest sentencing law changes—barely moved the needle.
Barkow’s new book, Justice Abandoned, starts with the same convincing premise: populist and politicized policymaking generally sustains the laws and practices that produce mass incarceration. She has now shifted both the focus for blame and reform to the U.S. Supreme Court, a choice both obvious and odd. Obvious because the Court clearly deserves some of the blame: for decades it has ruled, in a variety of cases that Barkow astutely unpacks, that the Constitution puts few restraints on the policies that have filled American prisons and jails. Odd because if there is one institution less likely than Congress or prosecutors to put the brakes on mass incarceration, it would seem to be the current Court.
Barkow tells a lucid, insightful story about how the United States went from a country with relatively ordinary levels of imprisonment for most of the twentieth century to the world leader in depriving citizens of liberty. Policymakers had to overcome several hurdles. To arrest, prosecute, convict and imprison a lot more people requires more money for more police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and prison cells. Barkow explains how the Court approved policies that made arrest, prosecution, and punishment cheaper and easier—and in the process more cruel, more biased, less accurate, and less just.
The number of people in pretrial detention—often for months—rapidly increased after Congress passed the 1984 Bail Reform Act, which for the first time authorized jailing defendants not for their past criminal conduct but based on a judge’s prediction about their future dangerousness. The Supreme Court approved this new basis for detention on the dubious rationale that jail before trial is not “punishment” but merely a “regulatory” practice to prevent crime. States quickly passed similar laws. Over the next two decades, pretrial detention skyrocketed. Before the BRA, one-quarter of people charged with federal crimes were jailed pretrial. Today, about three-quarters are; average detention time has grown from two months to nearly twelve. Whether this change makes the world safer is basically unknowable. While we know most defendants out on bail don’t commit another crime, we have no idea how many were needlessly detained based on an erroneous prediction about their dangerousness.
Most people in prisons have been convicted of something, but very few by a jury. Nearly all pled guilty. Defendants have always had the option admit guilt, but only in the last half century did the Supreme Court endorse plea bargaining and allow prosecutors to condition guilty pleas on defendants waiving not only trials but also rights to appeal, to challenge illegal searches, or to see government evidence. It also approved pressure tactics such as making one defendant’s plea bargain conditional on another defendant also pleading guilty. In the Court’s view, none of this was coercive. A choice between pleading guilty to a five-year sentence or a mandatory life sentence after trial merely gives defendants a free choice. And if defendants plead guilty freely, surely none confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Yet, as Barkow notes, a shocking number of wrongful convictions—confirmed by DNA evidence—were the result of defendants who pled guilty. The Court ignored the foreseeable strategy its rulings enabled: prosecutors use the greatest pressure when their evidence of guilt is weakest. When government’s case is strong, prosecutors can simply show their cards, which convinces most defendants to plead guilty for even modest leniency.
Once these tactics were widely adopted, the share of trial convictions shrank from an already-modest twenty percent in the 1970s to barely three percent. Legislatures pitched in by enacting harsher sentencing laws to give prosecutors more bargaining leverage: the harsher the potential post-trial sentence, the more readily defendants agree to avoid it through a plea bargain. Average sentences grew in the last four decades along with the number of convictions. Barkow reports that life sentences proliferated, so that one in seven prisoners are now in for life—one in five for black prisoners. Barkow describes how the Court concluded that the Constitution had effectively nothing to say about excessive prison sentences. Despite the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments, the Court ruled it was not judges’ job to decide whether sentences are so unconstitutionally disproportionate—even when, as in Harmelin v. Michigan, a first offender’s sentence for having less than a kilogram of cocaine was life-without-parole.
Imprisonment is expensive. States have long minimized costs through overcrowding and failing to provide decent food and basic health care. In the 1970s, these practices were so widespread that lower courts declared prison conditions unconstitutional in thirty-one states. Then the Supreme Court decided, in 1981, that the Constitution gave states wide leeway on overcrowding and substandard conditions. Barkow suggests that the Court feared that it was up against realistic limits of judicial power. The Court observed in one case that, if it held that the Constitution required every inmate to have a nine-by-six foot space two-thirds of all inmates would be deemed imprisoned unconstitutionally.
Whether states would have ignored such strictures is speculative but doubtful. States did as little as possible in the face of court-ordered reforms, but none defied judicial authority. In 2011, when the Supreme Court narrowly affirmed a lower court order for California to address its grossly overcrowded prisons—in which, among other cruelties, mentally ill inmates were locked in cages rather than given medical treatment—the state complied. Barkow joins other scholars in the conclusion that, by gutting constitutional oversight of prisons, the Court removed what could have been a meaningful constraint on the steady increase in prison and jail populations.
Still, it remains an open question what prisons would look like had the Court opted for a different path across the landmark decisions Barkow criticizes. There are reasons to think Barkow is right: the Court could have hindered mass incarceration by interpreting key constitutional provisions in line with its earlier decisions and in accord with plausible understandings of the Constitution’s original meaning. Courts’ job is sometimes to make clear that the Constitution prohibits some policy choices favored by legislatures and voters. Doing so, they often succeed. Lower courts once forced meaningful reforms of some of the worst prisons. When a federal court found overwhelming evidence of racially biased stop-and-frisk practices by New York City police, the NYPD changed its policy without measurable effect on crime prevention.
On the other hand, sometimes bad-but-popular policies find ways around judicial roadblocks. Southern school districts for decades avoided Brown v. Board of Education’s bar on racial segregation. Perhaps prosecutors and trial judges would have found other ways to replace trials with guilty pleas even without the harshest pressure tactics for plea bargains. If forced to improve prison conditions, maybe states would have ramped up leasing prison labor. Prohibiting the most extreme sentencing laws might have yielded only slightly less extreme ones. When the Court banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for teenage offenders, the effect in some states was barely noticeable: they now impose life sentences with a chance for parole decades in the future.
However that alternate world might have turned out, criticizing the Supreme Court’s mass incarceration decisions at this late date is more an argument about the consequences of flawed constitutional interpretation than a roadmap for reform. For the foreseeable future, the Court will have a conservative super-majority with no inclination to revisit Barkow’s hit-list of bad precedents, all of which were put in place by less conservative versions of the Court. Realistic prospects for reform, dim though they are, more likely rest with the process in which Barkow understandably places little hope: democratic politics. There has, in fact, been some modest progress through—among other things—reform of bail, sentencing, and marijuana laws and mass clemency for certain drug offenses. Those reforms are far too little to reverse a half-century of mass incarceration. But for now, they seem to be the most we can expect.
Dec 11, 2025 Maximo Langer
The Fourth Amendment right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures has been celebrated as one of the most important bulwarks of freedom in American law. One of the main reasons for such a belief is that when warrants are required, they must be issued by a neutral and detached magistrate. Aside from anecdotal knowledge by legal practitioners and a very small set of empirical studies, we know very little about the actual process of search and seizure warrants. Unwarranted Warrants? An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Review in Search and Seizure by Miguel F.P. de Figueiredo, Brett Hashimoto and Dane Thorley is important because it fills a vacuum in this regard by presenting the largest empirical study on the judicial review of search and seizure warrants in the United States to date. It is also important because its empirical findings reveal substantial shortcomings in the warrant process in Utah that are likely present in other jurisdictions in the United States.
The authors base their analysis on a comprehensive dataset from Utah’s statewide electronic warrant platform. The dataset includes digital timestamps, full warrant affidavit texts of approved warrants, and identifying information about judges and officers. (P. 1983.) The digital timestamps allow the authors to analyze the time judicial officers take in reviewing warrant applications, and scraping the pdfs of the warrants and the warrant applications allowed them to collect data on the length, complexity, facts, and legal content of the warrants. (P. 1984.) In addition, the use of both quantitative and qualitative data allows the authors to get a more nuanced picture and analysis of the judicial review of warrant applications.
The most interesting part of the article is its empirical findings.
In terms of review time of approved warrant applications, the median review times by judicial officers was only three minutes, with 10% reviewed and signed in under sixty seconds. (Pp. 1996 et seq., 2040.) In this regard, the authors found substantial disparities in their review times among judges, with a set of judges having a median review time of less than two minutes and a few having a median review time of less than one minute. (P. 2016.) Using a series of regressions, the authors then examined whether judges’ characteristics were correlated with review time, finding that the length of judge’s tenure in years and the background as a defense attorney were correlated with shorter review time. (P. 2017 et seq.) The authors understandably found this last result surprising and hypothesize that one potential mechanism at play is that judges with “… such a professional background provided them with more opportunities to critically evaluate warrants and see the most common reasons for approved warrants to be later overturned.” (P. 2023.) Alternatively, given the way judges are appointed in Utah, it is possible that “judicial candidates with criminal defense backgrounds may have to overcome a presumption of being soft on crime.” (P. 2023.)
In terms of the rate of approval of warrant applications, the authors found that 93.56% of warrant affidavits were approved in their initial submission, and that once resubmissions were included the approval was 98.14%. (Pp. 2025-26.) (The authors report these numbers as part of their main findings. But they also explain that if they included the submissions that were withdrawn before a judge could review them, the approval rate of initial submissions was 89.90%, and of submissions and resubmissions was 96.96%. (P. 2026.)) In this context, their study finds wide disparities between judges; some approved almost 100% of affidavits they received, while others approved less than 80%.
The authors run a series of regressions on approval-not approval of warrant applications as the dependent variable and judicial characteristics, finding statistically significant correlations that judges with law degrees and, somewhat surprisingly, judges who previously served as prosecutors, were less likely to approve warrant applications. (P. 2031-32.) The authors hypothesize that judges with a prosecutor background were less likely to approve because their prior work experience may have changed the way those judges approach and understand warrant review. (P. 2032.) Alternatively, they hypothesize that the interplay between prior legal practice and ideology may not go in the traditionally understood direction. (P. 2032.) They also found that male and white judges are more likely to approve warrant applications, which could be the result of them tending to be more conservative than nonwhite and female judges. (P. 2032.)
Regarding the interpretation of their main findings, the authors acknowledge that for many, their results will be another proof that the penal system is broken. (P. 2041.) But the authors conclude that their data do not show that all warrants are simply “rubber stamped”, since the initial approval rate of warrants reveals some level of judicial scrutiny. (Pp. 1967, 2015, 2028, 2029.)
The authors acknowledge that there is not a baseline on the rate of approval of warrant applications and on how long it should take to review them. (Pp. 1992-93, 1996, 2026, 2034, 2042.) They also acknowledge the likelihood that law enforcement officers learn (the judicial interpretation of) the legal standard and adjust their request accordingly. (P. 2026.)
However, the authors persuasively argue that these results are concerning for multiple reasons.
First, even if there is no baseline to assess how long a judicial assessment of warrant applications should take and even accounting for economies of scale, the authors argue that the review time of warrant affidavits of three minutes for the majority of affidavits and of under sixty seconds for ten percent of the warrants are “… often much more brief than the generally accepted understanding of the constitutional warrant requirement would anticipate.” (P. 1996.) In this regard, they find objectively problematic that there were judges who reviewed half of all their warrants in less than a minute. (P. 2016.)
In addition, the authors argue that given the speed at which warrants were reviewed, judges were missing some submissions that did not meet the legal standards, which would play a role in explaining the high judicial approval rate of warrant applications. (P. 2016.)
The authors also reason that the fact that most judges find that at least 4 to 5% of warrant applications do not meet the legal requirements suggest that those judges that approve all of the warrant applications they receive are not taking the warrant process the way they should. (Pp. 2029-30.)
The authors also engaged in a qualitative in-depth review of two subsets of randomly selected warrant approvals from their dataset that provided additional elements to have concerns about the practice of warrant review in Utah. (P. 2035.)
In explaining the shortcomings of judges’ warrant review in Utah, the authors do not attribute it to poor judging, but rather as the “inevitable result” of the jurisprudential nature of warrant review and extralegal factors that they list, such as the motivations of law enforcement of “ferreting out crime” that may bleed into the judge’s decision, the ex-parte and repeat-play nature of the warrant review process, judicial resource constraints and expediency, and the cognitive difficulty of reviewing warrants. (Pp. 1990, 2041.)
Their interpretation of their results thus concludes:
Taken together, we argue that our empirical and qualitative evidence raise serious concerns about the ability of the current warrant-review process to meet its call as the bulwark against police error or abuse…. If the system has these flaws, then we must call into question the efficacy of Supreme Court decisions that rely on the warrant process as a higher standard to preserve the privacy rights of the citizenry….” (P. 2042.)
Finally, the authors explore avenues for reform. First, they call for continued empirical study that states and local governments could facilitate by implementing data transparency and reporting requirements with respect to warrants. (P. 2043.) They also show skepticism about doctrinal reforms such as changing the legal standards for issuing warrants and for warrant review given how deeply embedded Fourth Amendment probable cause jurisprudence is and that doctrinal reform is primarily a back-end recourse. (P. 2044.) Instead, they find more promising policy reforms such as bans or restrictions on the use of no-knock warrants, requiring mandatory review by police-chiefs or prosecutors of certain types of warrants, and creating magistrate panels to review certain types of warrants. (Pp. 2044-45.) They also advocate for institutional and behavioral policies, such as external reviews—e.g., occasional, random audits of a judge’s warrants or police officer’s affidavits and warrant requests—ways for judges to become more self-informed about their own practices, and encouraging criminal defense attorneys to avail themselves of data on warrants to challenge warrants. (Pp. 2045-47.)
Nov 13, 2025 Jessica M. Eaglin
Data-driven policing technologies. By now, you can probably name a few off the top of your head. Facial recognition technology, GPS location monitoring devices, Automated License Plate Readers, ShotSpotter, and of course, predictive policing software. All are common examples of surveillance tools used by police which rely on algorithms to process large amounts of data. But what are these tools? Traditionally, we understand them as “technology.” In her recent article, Police Technology Experiments, Elizabeth Joh considers whether and how legal engagement with these tools might change if we conceptualize these technologies as “experiments.” Because her novel framework begs important questions at the intersection of law, technology, and science in contemporary society, this is a must-read essay for legal scholars interested in policing, criminal law, and beyond.
Joh begins by explaining the current legal and social framework in which police technologies are evaluated. She defines police surveillance technologies as tools that make use of vast amounts of data and utilize algorithmic tools to sort, classify, analyze and produce inferences from that information for criminal investigation. These tools, she explains, exist within a scant regulatory environment. Investigative police surveillance does not trigger many (if any) Fourth Amendment restrictions. Further, data-driven policing is an increasingly dominant model of policing across the United States. Whether due to federal funding support and/or marketing and incentives from proprietary vendors, this model is expanding. Despite standout U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Carpenter v. United States and Riley v. California, very little exists in the way of comprehensive regulation on police departments’ use of these technologies.
In light of this scant regulatory environment, Joh proposes conceptualizing (and thus approaching) police surveillance technologies as “technology experiments on human subjects.” As experiments, these tools would be evaluated for their adherence to “scientific method,” with an emphasis on “well-designed testing.” She argues that “the unproven uses of an automated system by the police for surveillance and intervention on human subjects” would reorient our focus toward ethical considerations because they are tested on people and communities akin to biomedical and behavioral research. Such research is guided by principles of “respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.”
Joh contends that this change in framework could result in different questions and practices in law. First, it would require a working hypothesis that government officials would evaluate in advance of experimentation. Joh looks to three examples where police deploy information technology to demonstrate the lack of such a practice: the Chicago Police Department’s adoption of an algorithmic risk assessment model to identify individuals who have a high risk of perpetrating or being the victim of gun violence (its “Strategic Subject List”); the Chicago Police Department’s adoption of acoustic gunshot technology (ShotSpotter) to assist in the deployment of police officers; and the Los Angeles Police Department’s program to identify high-risk individuals for extra police attention via an algorithmic system (aka Operation LASER—Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration). In each instance, plausible hypotheses about the technology’s use—whether it is aimed to reduce violence, gun crimes, or bias in policing—would have been clearly contestable in advance of implementation. Joh points to the history of policing in Chicago and Los Angeles, along with Inspector General reports on the programs in each jurisdiction, to support this point. Moreover, evidence of each program’s failure to meet these goals after implementation would be obvious and pertinent to whether such programs should continue in a jurisdiction. Further, she contends that ethical considerations would be more prominent. The fact that these tools were deployed in areas largely populated by Black and Brown communities makes clear the unequal distribution of research benefits and burdens from an ethical point of view.
Ultimately, Joh contends, this framework makes visible and important various aspects of police surveillance technology’s expansion that are considered distinct from either technical or Fourth Amendment critiques. It is this last point that makes her essay so intriguing. Through it, Joh begs an important question about the blindspots that arise when a legal practice is considered a “technology” versus “science.” Characterizing police surveillance technologies as “experiments” demands that we take more seriously scientific standards which may be easily overlooked when the tools are characterized as a technology in criminal law.
Now, I am not convinced that this bioethical framework would lead to different practices among police departments, particularly for Black and Brown communities. We have a long history of using science as a tool of subordination alongside law. Indeed, bioethical regulations often exist because of abuses in scientific study concentrated among marginalized communities. Yet whether Joh’s framework actually leads to different outcomes among police departments is only part of the point. Joh’s essay underscores that we can frame information technology in criminal law as both science and technology. What kinds of issues arise the more we hew in one direction or the other is an important question for policing scholars, criminal law scholars, and beyond to consider going forward. This essay does a wonderful job bringing that question to the fore.
Oct 14, 2025 Eric J. Miller
Ekow Yankah’s article, Deputization and Privileged White Violence, makes a stark claim: every state and territory in the United States has a legal-power-conferring norm enabling “violence aimed at racial minorities, particularly Black people, by White people who, as private citizens, take themselves to be innately authorized to police racial minorities.” (P. 709.) He calls this legal authority “deputization.”
Yankah’s article is a work of conceptual-normative criminal law theory. His claim is that deputization is a normative feature of our society, and as such “not easily amenable to empirical verification.” (P. 715.) His methodology is therefore one of “philosophical reconstitution” of the concept of deputization as a “sociologically and historically embedded” legal power. Nonetheless, he wants us to take this claim head on: he really means that deputization is a currently-existing legal norm empowering white people to police Black people using violence to seize Black people they think are dangerous, including by using deadly force. Deputization, Yankah claims, is legal in every jurisdiction in the land. Worse, because that private policing norm is available only to white people it is, in part, constitutive of what it means to be a white person in the United States.
Were Yankah describing only a widely shared social norm, that would be momentous enough. However, Yankah’s claim is more profound: despite Reconstruction, the civil rights revolution, and the constitutional, statutory, and case-law doctrines invalidating enslavement, segregation, and various forms of racial discrimination, there has existed an historically persistent, universal (in the United States, at least) legally enforceable norm that has escaped these attempts at express legal repudiation. Instead, deputization endures as some type of law that hides in plain sight to empower white people to use (often deadly) violence to regulate the behavior of Black people they characterize as dangerous.
There are a few other normative claims that Yankah makes on the way, but the core thesis is that to be a white person in the United States is to have the benefit of a law that allows you to use violence to regulate the behavior of Black people you perceive to be dangerous. How could Yankah establish that such a legal power exists?
The usual way of explaining the existence of a legal power is by pointing to some express law—a statute or a case—that, by the law-creating act of some official or body, serves as the source of that power. However, there is another source of law I think Yankah identifies here: customary law. Customary law is neither express nor made by individuals (whether legislative bodies or judges). Instead, customary law is created by the behavior of legal officials, usually judges, collectively in recognizing through their conduct some practice as having the status of law.
Normally, theorists point to judge-created law when discussing contemporary customary law. Yankah does canvas a history of statutes, cases, and common-law doctrines expressly creating civilian powers and even duties to arrest as part of the earlier history of deputization. However, since the 1960s, judge-made and legislated laws have prohibited anti-Black discrimination as a matter of formal law. How could anti-Black laws persist in the face of these express legal norms?
One answer is that the power to create law does not reside solely with the legislature or the judiciary. While a variety of legal theorists, including Joseph Raz and John Gardner, point to the practice of judges and other legal officials, including police and prosecutors, as having the ability to create customary legal norms, for the most part, these theorists concentrate on the law-creating powers of judges and not these law-enforcement officials. One of the innovative aspects of Yankah’s article is that he asks us to attend to law-enforcement officials’ ability to create customary norms by treating as binding their practice of nullifying criminal laws that conflict with the ability of white people to use often-deadly violence against Black people they characterize as dangerous.
Yankah’s argument can be a little normatively tricky at times, but one version is that there is not simply a social custom of anti-Black violence (what Bentham calls a custom in pays, or of the people) but also a legal custom of non-prosecution of that violence (Bentham’s custom in foro) practiced by legal officials, in particular, police and prosecutors. Social customs can themselves be legally recognized in a number of ways, one of which is by also becoming a legal custom. To illustrate the point, consider a phenomenon identified by Mitchell Berman as “temporal variance.”
In basketball games, referees do not enforce foul rules toward the end of important matches. Temporal variance is not an act of discretion on the part of one or two officials; it is a routinely applied part of the game, and players, officials, and fans commonly criticize those officials who flout this practice. But note: the temporal variance rule, though applied uniformly, is nowhere stated in the rules of basketball. Instead, the referees practice a form of official nullification that allows the players to engage in conduct that would be contrary to the rules on another occasion. This shared official activity creates a customary norm of basketball, enforced by the norm-applying officials, and relied upon by referees, players, and spectators alike.
It’s not always clear whether Yankah thinks there is a socio-official customary norm in each legal system affirmatively empowering white people to use violence to police Black people, or a separate official customary norm, in this case, of executive official nullification, that recognizes the social customary norm of white anti-Black violence. I think a sympathetic reconstruction of Yankah’s argument is that legal officials, especially police and prosecutors, engage in a form of nullification and treat certain aspects of white supremacy as normative for their enforcement or application of the law. These officials’ nullifying acts have a different legal status than non-officials’ (e.g., juries) because officials can create customary law by what they do; non-officials cannot (unless their customs are recognized as law). Thus, there is a difference between judicial or prosecutorial nullification (legal custom) and jury nullification or even widespread community pressure not to prosecute (social custom).
Even this weaker claim, of a law-enforcement custom of nullification, is sufficient to support the phenomenon of legal deputization, and raises some profound questions of sovereignty and criminalization: in other words, of who makes the criminal law. First, the issue of legal pluralism—that there are multiple, overlapping sources of law regulating the process of seizure in this country. Yankah adds another one to the mix of federal, state, and municipal law: the customary law of the police and prosecutors nullifying deadly racist seizures of Black people by white citizens. Legal pluralism points to the further question of legal sovereignty: do police and prosecutors constitute independent law-making institutions that stand apart from the legislature and courts as sovereign sources of law? Yankah’s article thus engages the political theory of the power and status of the police. Yankah’s article also forces us ask who deputizes the deputy: the state, the (white) community, or some sub-state institution (the county or municipality)? Finally, Yankah presses hard on the decriminalization question: what will it take to prevent prosecutors and police creating an anti-constitutional and anti-democratic—certainly anti-equality—customary law of white deputization? These questions, currently at the fringes of our theories of the police, are only likely to become more central over the coming months and years.
Sep 12, 2025 Maartje van der Woude
Legal scholars in the United States may be tempted to see the British immigration system as distant or parochial, marked by its own bureaucratic idiosyncrasies and Commonwealth-era legacies. But Mary Bosworth’s Supply Chain Justice makes clear that this is a mistake. This searing ethnographic analysis of immigration detention in the United Kingdom reveals not just a national policy architecture, but a global paradigm of border enforcement—one that resonates powerfully with ongoing developments in the United States.
At its heart, Supply Chain Justice is a meditation on outsourced state power: what happens when liberal democracies turn over core functions—especially the coercive task of incarceration—to private corporations, acting under performance-based contracts with limited oversight and diffuse responsibility. Bosworth uses the concept of the “supply chain” to describe the web of public and private actors—guards, managers, administrators, NGOs, civil servants—who collectively operate the UK’s immigration detention system.
The U.S. reader will instantly recognize the parallels: the growth of private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic, the contractual delegation of migrant detention to remote facilities, the proliferation of “non-places” of legal limbo, such as ICE holding centers and CBP’s “short-term facilities.” Like in the UK, U.S. border control increasingly relies on legal formalism paired with moral distancing, where procedures are rigorously documented but accountability is elusive.
Bosworth’s key contribution lies not just in documenting this machinery, but in illuminating the emotional, ethical, and legal dislocations it creates. Drawing on interviews and observations inside privately-run detention centers, she reveals how frontline staff often experience their roles as morally ambivalent. They are rule-followers, enforcers, caretakers, and sometimes critics—all at once. Detainees, meanwhile, are caught in a system where legal rights are formally acknowledged but substantively hollow.
This analysis speaks directly to U.S. debates over immigration enforcement, subcontracted governance, and the erosion of constitutional accountability. Consider the rise of “shadow immigration proceedings” in the U.S., expedited removals, or migrant child detention at ORR facilities run by private contractors. As in the UK, the fragmentation of detention authority serves both logistical and political purposes: it makes the system scalable, depersonalized, and insulated from legal challenge.
What Bosworth offers is a critical legal ethnography that complements doctrinal analysis. Her work forces readers—especially legal scholars—to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions:
When the administration of detention is parceled out to private firms, who holds the moral and legal responsibility for harm?
Bosworth’s ethnography pushes us to confront the legal black holes created by contractual governance. When private firms manage the daily realities of confinement—when they decide who gets to call a lawyer, when to initiate solitary confinement, or how medical care is rationed—accountability becomes a game of deflection. Staff cite corporate policy. Corporations invoke government directives. The state pleads budgetary constraint or logistical necessity. Legal scholars familiar with doctrines of sovereign immunity, agency liability, or Bivens actions will find themselves asking: can tort law or constitutional remedies meaningfully address harm when responsibility is functionally and legally disaggregated? Bosworth invites us to see not just gaps in oversight, but a system designed to diffuse blame—a moral vacuum wrapped in legal insulation.
Can a rights-based legal system operate within a contract-based enforcement regime?
This question cuts to the conceptual heart of Bosworth’s intervention. Liberal legal orders premise legitimacy on rights—due process, humane treatment, legal redress. But detention contracts are performance-managed tools of efficiency: they reward cost-cutting, speed, and security metrics. Bosworth’s interviews show how this contractual logic infiltrates everyday decisions: how long a detainee waits for medication, whether grievances are logged, how disciplinary decisions are recorded. Rights, in this regime, become aspirational rather than enforceable—check-boxes rather than guarantees. For U.S. scholars examining the rise of algorithmic adjudication, contractor-run juvenile facilities, or constitutional claims in outsourced systems, Bosworth’s work underscores a hard truth: contract law may operationalize detention, but it also subordinates justice to deliverables.
What happens to justice when the state itself becomes a client in a supply chain?
Perhaps the most arresting insight in Supply Chain Justice is how the state transforms from a guarantor of justice to a consumer of detention “services.” Bosworth’s metaphor of the supply chain is not just descriptive—it’s diagnostic. Once the state contracts for enforcement, it adopts the logic of procurement: efficiency, risk transfer, vendor compliance. The law becomes a specification, not a framework of values. In this context, “justice” becomes transactional, stripped of its ethical dimension. For U.S. readers, this frames a deeper concern about the administrative state—not just its reach, but its retreat. When enforcement is privatized, the state’s presence becomes both expansive and abstract, powerful and unaccountable. Bosworth forces us to consider whether justice can survive when the state becomes just another node in a logistical network.
Supply Chain Justice is also a methodological exemplar. It brings rich qualitative data into dialogue with political theory, legal doctrine, and administrative structure. Bosworth writes with a rare mix of clarity, empathy, and analytic precision. U.S. scholars interested in border criminology, privatized punishment, and administrative statecraft will find this book indispensable.
It’s easy to dismiss privatized immigration enforcement as a policy flaw or a budgetary expedient. Bosworth shows it is neither: it is a philosophical and institutional choice, one that reshapes the legal meaning of justice. Her book is a call to rethink where and how law operates—and where it deliberately does not.
For those of us in the U.S. looking to understand the logics behind our own carceral border regime, Bosworth’s account is not just useful; it is essential.
Aug 1, 2025 Sheldon Evans
As a hostage and their kidnapper physically struggle, both desperately trying to pry away a loaded firearm from the other, a police sniper takes the shot. The entire world pauses while looking to their smart phones for an update on this ongoing hostage crisis, and then moves on just as quickly. This surreal climax of the Black Mirror episode “Smitherines” brilliantly sets the visceral stakes of the ongoing transactions between Big Tech and Big Brother. But as Professor Yan Fang uncovered, this arms-length partnership is not as seamless as Big Tech pessimists might believe. There are what she calls “knowledge misalignments” between these two institutions that complicate the picture of the next generation of law enforcement, investigations, and individual privacy rights.
In Internet Technology Companies as Evidence Intermediaries, Fang discusses the reality that tech companies have become evidence intermediaries. This is fictionally illustrated in “Smitherines,” where the kidnapping of a social media company’s employee leads to an unlikely partnership between the social media company and law enforcement as they both try to uncover as much information as possible about the kidnapper. One of eerie takeaways from this on-screen partnership is that the social media company is able to access and leverage far more information about the kidnapper from his social media profiles than police detectives with years of experience. This striking commentary illustrates the real-world truth that tech companies are custodians of petabytes of consumer information that billions of people around the world freely share on their platforms. Thus, Fang describes that when law enforcement agencies (LEAs) seek information about these consumers for a variety of investigatory purposes, tech companies serve as the intermediary between LEAs and the trove of evidence they seek.
While Black Mirror specializes in drama and hyperbole, the stakes are indeed high. To take one example, LEAs have used genetic information from 23andMe to solve cold-cases with DNA evidence. Privacy experts also point out that LEAs may seek information from apps that women use to track their menstrual cycle to track pregnancies and potential abortions in a post-Roe v. Wade world in places where abortions are criminalized.
In a growing law and tech field that can ironically feel stagnant by canvasing the same issues or proposing the same solutions, Fang’s piece shows innovation in its methodology and scholarly contributions. Over the course of several years, Fang engaged in a qualitative research study, interviewing dozens of employees from tech companies and LEAs to learn how their exchange of information works on the ground. Breaking free of the ivory tower and going where the rubber hits the road uncovered some surprising takeaways from the people who actually have power over our most intimate information.
Fang’s contribution to this literature identifies just how much gets lost in translation between Big Tech and LEAs, which she terms as “knowledge misalignment.” She uses this term to summarize her findings that both parties in the exchange of information often do not have adequate knowledge of the other’s policies, procedures, or purposes. For example, when an LEA is seeking specific and targeted information, they often do not have adequate knowledge about how to request such information from the tech company. Perhaps the LEA will ask about a person’s “buddy list,” but this vernacular may not correspond with how the tech company keeps information. The tech company might allow users to create a “friends list,” or they have a “buddy list” and a “friends list,” or they have neither. Another problem might arise if an LEA blindly requests “all relevant information.” That might be overbroad, and also might very well overwhelm the LEA, providing a haystack when it is really looking for a needle.
On the other side of the knowledge misalignment relationship, a tech employee who is tasked with responding to an LEA request for information will almost never have knowledge of the LEA’s investigatory purpose, and this may limit the employee’s ability to adequately respond. If an LEA asks for a consumer’s “session time,” a tech employee might be left wondering what type of information the LEA really wants. Do they want a record of when a consumer logged in and logged out of the company’s website? Or do they really want a record of when the consumer rented or sold something on the website? Without more knowledge of the LEA’s investigatory purpose (such as investigating a person renting property to facilitate production of methamphetamine, or communicating inappropriately with underage children), tech employees are making their best guess in a good-faith effort to be responsive to the LEA’s lawful request.
The findings I found most interesting from Fang’s interviews are those that are intertwined with my normative suspicions of the Big Tech – Big Brother relationship. On the tech side, employees were worried about not providing responsive information to LEAs because it might increase their workload. If they gave the LEAs unresponsive information, this could lead to the LEAs following up for more information, even though Fang found that such follow-ups were rare. This perspective of tech employees surprised me; perhaps in my naivety, I expected for tech companies to be champions of safeguarding consumers’ information from government intrusion. Instead, Fang’s study left me with a sense that these employees—while well-intentioned—are struggling to find the right balance between multiple stakeholders: the consumers that trust them with their data, LEAs who legitimately need information for many important purposes, and their co-workers who must manage their workflow. Fang also notes that some tech companies have developed their own procedures for streamlining this process to decrease transaction costs. Not every tech company is going to litigate their consumers’ privacy rights to protect against government encroachment. Perhaps Fang’s work has made me finally realize that tech companies’ promises of privacy are a farce in this new age of human flourishing.
This dovetails with Fang’s findings from LEA personnel interviews. LEAs reported encountering both cooperative and adversarial attitudes from tech companies. Many found tech companies to be incredibly helpful, going the extra mile to help an LEA officer obtain the information they sought; others reported that tech companies could provide arbitrary responses that would not produce helpful information. As somebody who believes strongly that the government must meet a high burden to infringe on individual liberties, I am suspicious of private tech companies helping LEAs meet their burden. Unfortunately, it appears the dynamic works in the opposite way for some tech companies; they see it as a burden to constantly be pestered by LEAs, so they have tried to make the process easier for everyone. This makes sense from the perspective of a private company that seeks to reduce their transaction costs, but it leads to a perverse result when they are further empowering the government to peer into somebody’s private life for the purposes of criminal or civil prosecution. While the normative balance between privacy and security is not within the scope of Fang’s study, she nevertheless contributes to this age-old discussion.
Fang’s study also uncovers an underappreciated truth: LEAs often acquiesce to the practices and expertise of tech companies. This practical realization flips the power dynamic of public vs. private on its head. Because the tech companies have what the LEAs want, they are not merely evidentiary intermediaries, but gatekeepers. Tech companies have possession of consumer information and are experts in how to access, collect, and interpret it. With this power comes great responsibility. If tech companies were to take an adversarial stance to protect their consumers’ personal information, LEAs would seldom have the time or the resources to fight for this information; but as tech companies consistently take a more cooperative approach, they give LEAs access to information that it would have otherwise taken countless hours of multiple trained investigators to uncover in previous generations. Tech companies need not acquiesce to LEAs; they have the power and responsibility to serve as a check against government overreach.
Fang addresses this overall approach of treating tech companies as protectors of privacy and gives some reason for caution. First, there may be incidents when tech companies help LEAs in a way that can lead to less intrusive information being shared. When tech employees work with LEAs to standardize or otherwise translate their requests, this often results in smaller amounts of information being shared, and prevents the sharing of large amounts of unresponsive information. Second, she correctly cautions us against putting too much trust into tech companies as the chivalrous protectors of our data. Tech companies will always seek more information, because information is money; the government will always seek more information because information is power; and if Big Tech and Big Brother are both operating according to these incentives, perhaps the responsibility lies with the individual to protect themselves. But this option seems less and less likely as we rely more on Big Tech to make our daily lives easier.
As we peer into the black mirror of our phones, tablets, and screens, what do we see? Fang’s work uncovers the nuances of a growing new relationship between Big Tech and Big Brother. Currently, this relationship suffers from knowledge misalignments, but both institutions seek to iron out much of these asymmetries. For those of us down the barrel of an LEA sniper for right or for wrong, the stakes are life and death. And for those others who will look at their phones for an update and move on with their life, so too are the stakes high for how this relationship impacts their life and their death.
Jul 2, 2025 Christopher Slobogin
Shawn Fields’ The New Public Safety: Police Reform and the Lurking Threat to Civil Liberties, which will be published by the University of California Press in September, is a brave and wise effort to envision a post-DeFund the Police world. While the defund movement has, at best, been a mixed success, some municipalities have experimented with de-policing routine interactions with people who are unhoused and mentally ill, authorizing civilian “violence interrupters” to roam the streets, and handing over traffic enforcement to unarmed officials. In The New Public Safety, Fields endorses these developments but also cautions that, without regulation, they will become simply a new version of policing, one that may look “soft” but in fact is not. At the same time, he argues that, with regulation, soft policing is preferable to the goal of entirely dismantling government-oriented responses, a goal that is currently popular in some circles but, as Field shows, goes too far.
Chapters One and Two of the book summarize current policing disaggregation trends. These chapters are full of statistics and disturbing stories that demonstrate why it is a bad idea to have armed officials—trained in the use of force and charged with detecting and stopping crime—function as first responders for vulnerable people in trouble and as enforcers of low-level infractions. This part of the book also details how specialized agencies charged with handling specific types of crises, such as homelessness, psychiatric emergencies, and social service crises, can, in theory, do a better job than the police at promoting public safety. Chapter Two ends by describing the views of abolitionists, who aver that replacing police with other government officials will simply reintroduce today’s carceral and exploitative responses in a different form. While Fields recognizes that possibility, he disagrees with the abolitionists’ goal of eliminating both traditional and soft policing and outlines what needs to be done to avoid the outcomes they fear.
Chapters Three and Four starkly demonstrate that Fields is not blind to the dangers of soft policing. In those chapters he catalogues instances of “social workers who abuse clients, psychiatrists who hospitalize high-functioning patients in gulags, medical personnel who violently assault the infirm, and homeless ‘outreach’ teams who sweep away entire communities without providing adequate alternatives.” He acknowledges that alternatives to arrest-by-police can still lead to unlawful use of force and custodial confinement and that social welfare programs can serve as opportunities or even fronts for collection of criminal evidence. But the solution, he asserts in the final chapters of the book, is not to abandon these alternatives but to ensure that the personnel in charge are completely independent from crime-fighting.
First, Fields emphasizes, these other government agents must be “disentangled” from the police. That requires, he says, “firewalled emergency hotlines” for these agencies, authorizing civilian agency response without police backup unless and until the agency specifically requests police presence, and limiting when the civilian responder “can call police or share details with the police, especially when illegal drug use, camping, or other nonviolent acts associated with these underlying conditions are present.”
The more important part of the book, however, is its shocking documentation of the fact that, under current constitutional doctrine, alternative responders are often given much more leeway than police when it comes to invading privacy and using force. Fields shows how, in the few cases that litigate the issue, courts often hide behind the notion that, if these alternative agents are not engaged in crime-fighting, they either don’t need to worry about the Fourth Amendment or at most need only abide by a watered-down special needs regime. Thus, as a constitutional matter, courts allow intrusions into homes (and tents) on mere suspicion and permit the use of excessive force with impunity. While non-constitutional remedies are available for some of this misconduct, the presence of immunity doctrines, the absence of attorney fees, and the difficulty of obtaining injunctive relief often found in state tort systems make them ineffective substitutes in many cases.
Fields also calls out the current trend toward broadening civil commitment standards to allow involuntary hospitalization and medication even of those people who are not imminently dangerous to self or others or unable to care for themselves. He rightly contends that, because it involves a seizure, detention of a person with mental illness, even under emergency circumstances, should require probable cause; it is high time the courts recognize that the Fourth Amendment applies to state efforts to detain people with mental illness. Similarly, medical personnel responding to emergencies and agencies charged with relocating homeless encampments are engaging in seizures and searches that should be subject to constitutional overview.
To discourage the deputization of these alternative responders by the police, Fields also argues that, in the absence of probable cause, evidence found by social workers making welfare checks, mental health professionals responding to calls for help, and housing agents monitoring the tents of the unhoused should be excluded from criminal trials. According to Fields, “[e]xcluding such illegally obtained evidence would protect citizens from alternate responder overreach, deter such misconduct, and promote a primary goal of the new public safety: disentangling nonviolent, noncriminal conduct from the tentacles of the carceral state.” Fields recognizes that, given the Supreme Court’s decision in Virginia v. Moore (holding that exclusion is not required for violations of state law unless the Fourth Amendment is also violated), mere state regulation along these lines will not be enough. Instead, rejecting Moore, he argues that the full force of Mapp v. Ohio needs to be leveraged to prevent soft policing from becoming a pretext for criminal investigations. To further aid in that endeavor, he argues, the motivation for searches and seizures should not matter. Proof of an “objective intrusion” should state a constitutional claim even if the government actor doing the intruding is acting with benign, non-investigative motives.
In his last chapter, Fields suggests that both the move to disaggregate policing and his call for better regulation of soft policing should appeal to all points on the political spectrum. Whether or not that is true, he has identified a middle road between current practice and abolition that makes eminent sense.
