In the aftermath of the spectacles of police brutality and the global protests they inspired, racialized policing remains a pressing problem in multicultural societies. It defines the quality and limits of citizenship for racialized individuals, religious minorities, sexual and gender minorities, unhoused individuals, and people with mental health issues, among other communities. Against a legal failure to address this pressing problem, socio-legal studies have disrupted institutional assumptions about policing and inequality in criminal justice systems. This course leverages these insights to explore the epistemological challenge of proving discrimination and the harms it inflicts on communities along the lines of ethno-racial identity and indigeneity. The course has two central goals: (1) to understand the role of racialized policing and legal responses in perpetuating inequality within the criminal justice system, and (2) to explore the strengths and limitations of socio-legal studies in uncovering and explaining these issues.
To achieve these goals, we will bridge doctrinal analysis on the law and policing complex with socio-legal studies of policing and inequality, set against the background of identity studies and Critical Legal Theory. The first part of the class will present and explain the overlapping issues of racial profiling and police violence, using case studies on discriminatory policing against racialized and indigenous communities in Canada, the US, and other multicultural
societies. The second part will explore the epistemological problem of discriminatory policing: the burden faced by racialized communities to prove the harms they face, as a matter of law and in the public sphere. In the third part, we will focus on the role of socio-legal studies in closing the gap between current jurisprudence and the realities of discrimination, discussing various methods, from surveys and quantitative analysis to in-depth interviews, ethnographies and mixed methods. We will examine works that focus on different figures involved in the dynamics of racialized policing and inequality more broadly, from affected communities to street cops, and all the way to legal
actors such as defense attorneys and judges. Through the contributions of these literatures, we will aim to map a path toward transformation.
Method of Evaluation:
Contributions to classroom discussion (10%), four 500-word comments on the readings (25%), research paper of 5,000 words for 1st-year students or 7,000 words for upper-year students (65%). Students are required to meet with the
instructor to discuss topics by the end of week 5; outline and preliminary bibliography are due by the end of week 7.