How does law’s relationship to violence shape its political possibilities and limitations?

Situated at the intersection of legal theory, social movement studies, carceral studies, and political and critical theory, my dissertation project and book manuscript, An Abolitionist Theory of Law, poses the question above through a study of the legal-theoretical implications of contemporary police and prison abolitionism. I argue that abolitionist politics and thinking 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. By marginalizing the moment of law-enforcement, I argue, an abolitionist theory of law might center the distinctive democratic import of the moment of law-making, extending its salutary freedom beyond events of formal promulgation and into everyday instances where actors decide how to live out their law.

The manuscript begins with an introduction that traces the ways modern thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Jürgen Habermas have imagined the relationship between law, politics, and violence. I claim that the emancipatory aspirations of each of these thinkers and the traditions they helped spawn have foundered on the aforementioned “enforcement compulsion,” which abolitionist thinking offers legal theory a way to transcend. 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 Black Studies scholar Fred Moten, reading both with and against Hannah Arendt. 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 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 looks to abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore to articulate an agnostic and variable relation between an abolitionist theory of law and the state form, where law offers an independent mechanism for groups to determine how to navigate the state in practice. It also 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. A fourth chapter places the theoretical insights from these chapters into more sustained conversation with a concrete episode and institution in the world of abolitionist politics. It 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.