A Move Toward Abolitionist Horizons? A Review of Devon W. Carbado’s Unreasonable

Abstract

Abolition captured national attention in 2020 following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Despite this attention, stakeholders favoring traditional legal reforms remain skeptical about the abolitionist demand to gradually eliminate police and prisons. Abolitionists, in contrast, have sought to identify how the Constitution can be interpreted to create a society that has no need for prisons. In his book, Unreasonable, Professor Devon W. Carbado offers an analysis of policing power and interpersonal violence that can aid traditional reformers in understanding just why abolitionists call for the elimination of the prison industrial complex. Further, his new interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, offered in the final chapter of the book, can aid abolitionists in identifying just how the Constitution could be utilized to curtail police power and reach an abolitionist horizon.

About the Author

Associate Professor of Law, The Ohio State Moritz College of Law. I thank Amna Akbar and César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández for their generous feedback. I am also grateful to the UCLA Law Review Discourse student editors for their editorial feedback and substantive comments.

By uclalaw