Responding to Abolition Anxieties: A Roadmap for Legal Analysis

Abstract

This Review uses Mariame Kaba’s book, We Do This Til' We Free Us, as a springboard and template for thinking through what abolitionist methodology might offer to legal analysis. It responds to a fundamental question: How does abolition theory supplement existing ways of thinking about legal problems? To push the question further, how can lawyers and legal academics add abolitionist thinking—and more specifically, the abolitionist critique—to the collection of “tools for thinking
about legal questions”?

I submit that abolition theory and the abolitionist ethic and critique in particular provide a core set of methodologies that can provide a pathway for law to serve as a mechanism for pursuing transformative abolitionist change. Furthermore, abolitionist methodologies provide a way to radically reshape legal analysis and ways of thinking through complex legal issues and solutions.

I also suggest how a “state of unrestrained imagination” could further reshape these ways of thinking.