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In this article, sociologist Susan P. Shapiro presents her research on the role of families in making end-of-life medical decisions on behalf of loved ones who lack the capacity to make them themselves.

This edition marks the 50th anniversary of the final book of five published on the ABF Survey on Criminal Justice Administration.

In this article, John Hagan hypothesizes that paternal incarceration affects the educational attainment of their children.

Susan Shapiro was interviewed by The Miami Herald about end-of-life decision-making for COVID-19 patients.

This article, featuring Stephen Daniels, surveys law students on experiential learning, the relation to career relevance, and preparedness upon graduation.

This chapter by Jothie Rajah analyses the Situation Room Photograph to illustrate transnational law as drama.

In light of challenges to the liberal international order, Tom Ginsburg asks, what would international law look like in an increasingly authoritarian world?

This policy brief provides a comprehensive analysis of recent U.S. law school enrollment trends, with particular attention to Asian Americans.

In this article, Susan P. Shapiro examines the failures and successes of advanced directives in the American medical system in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By drawing on After the JD Project data, this article examines changes in career structures at corporate law firms, which shape elite legal careers.

Janice Nadler examines the portrayal of homicide victims in “The Wire” and the social and economic factors that contribute to their value in this article.

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“Deserve Got Nothin’ to Do with It”: The Value of Homicide Victims in The Wire

Janice Nadler
Protecting Rights and Accessing Justice
2019

From the University of Chicago Legal Forum 

The moral principle of placing the highest value on human life is a basic one. It underlies a central responsibility of criminal law. But within the universe of the American crime drama series “The Wire”, these fundamental principles break down. The focus of government investigations is framed by the drug war, which sometimes distorts the goals and decisions of law enforcement strategy. At most, each killing in the inner city is typically acknowledged by the state in the form of an uptick in the police department’s weekly ComStat counts, by the press as a story buried deep within the paper, or not mentioned at all.

In this article, I argue that the frequency of killings and the sheer number of victims can itself result in the distortion of basic values and priorities. Exposure to large human death tolls can result in what researchers have called psychic numbing. Against the background of a large aggregate tragedy, each new death represents an incremental increase, which fails to register emotionally because our compassion becomes fatigued. In The Wire, psychically-numbed characters pursue institutional goals unencumbered by the negative emotions that otherwise might prompt them to question their participation in acts that lead to perverse outcomes. Less visible is the implicit hierarchical ordering of victims which, in addition to psychic numbing, contributes to law operating in a manner not always predicted by the law in the books. There were many premeditated murders depicted in The Wire, and the responsible individuals were depicted as almost never receiving punishment by the criminal justice system. This fictional depiction of the absence of accountability for killings is unfortunately largely accurate in many large U.S. cities today.