Writing Vagrant Nation

21 Pages Posted: 3 Dec 2018 Last revised: 5 Dec 2018

See all articles by Risa L. Goluboff

Risa L. Goluboff

University of Virginia School of Law

Date Written: November 28, 2018

Abstract

In my response to reviews by Christopher Agee, Christopher Schmidt, Karen Tani, and Laura Weinrib, I explain some of the challenges of writing Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s. In particular, I explore the challenge of creating narrative coherence without losing the essential multiplicity of the story or compromising my methodological commitment to constitutional history across the many actors involved in the legal change process. I ultimately constructed such coherence on three levels: narrative, thematic, and doctrinal. Narratively, I settled on a larger role for the Supreme Court than initially anticipated, while still decentering the Court substantively, methodologically, and causally. I located thematic coherence largely in a new vision of the “sixties.” The decade that emerges was marked by a common claim of people deemed out of place to make their own places in the world; an evolving if incomplete effort to disentangle difference from danger; and the crucial role of both sympathy and empathy in the success of the challenge to vagrancy laws. Though numerous legal arguments ran through that challenge, doctrinal multiplicity—the refusal to flatten or narrow the complex set of arguments and harms that vagrancy cases presented—became its own form of coherence.

Keywords: vagrancy, 1960s, social movements, constitutional history, legal change, sympathy, empathy

Suggested Citation

Goluboff, Risa L., Writing Vagrant Nation (November 28, 2018). Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 43, No. 4, 2018, Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2018-64, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3292269

Risa L. Goluboff (Contact Author)

University of Virginia School of Law ( email )

580 Massie Road
Charlottesville, VA 22903
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/Faculty.nsf/FHPbI/9230

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