Writing & Media

Link: Law & Social Inquiry, 46, no. 4, (November 2021): 1022 – 1061. (peer-reviewed)

In the 1960s, farmers pressed trespass charges against aid workers providing assistance to agricultural laborers living on the farmers’ private property. Some of the first court decisions to address these types of trespass, such as the well-known and frequently taught State v. Shack (1971), limited the property rights of farmers and enabled aid workers to enter camps where migrants lived. Yet there was a world before Shack, a world in which farmers welcomed onto their land rural religious groups, staffed largely by women from the local community, who provided services to migrant workers. From the 1940s through the 1960s, federal, state, and local law left large gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers in Michigan. In response, church women created rural safety nets that mobilized local generosity and provided aid. This article uses Michigan as a case study to argue that these informal safety nets also policed migrant morality, maintained rural segregation, and performed surveillance of community outsiders, thereby serving the farmers’ goals of having a reliable and cheap labor force—ultimately strengthening the economic and legal structures that left agricultural workers vulnerable.

Link: Annals of Iowa 79, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 247-83. (peer-reviewed)

*Received the 2021 Mildred Throne & Charles Aldrich Academic History Award

Through the eyes of Charles Pendleton’s memoirs, this article explores the use of prosecutorial discretion in one rural county in 1920s Iowa. Rural communities like those in Buena Vista County, Iowa, experienced “the law” through distinctly isolated geographies and social networks that lacked anonymity and thus shaped available methods of conflict resolution. Colin Johnson has called this lack of anonymity, “onymousness—their named-ness and known-ness,” and it altered patterns of dispute and dispute resolution in small communities. But onymity did not mean homogeneity. Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity created divisions within a community where social distance between individuals was small. Both onymity and diversity shaped who should have access to which type of sanctions and remedies. Some transgressions of the law did not always align with transgressions of social norms. In those cases, illustrated most clearly in bootlegging, Pendleton’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion adhered closely to the letter of the law. In other cases, social transgressions did align with legal transgressions, but often formal legal processes were not triggered in response. Sorting out some of the ways rural social networks informed these discretionary decisions is the aim of this article. 

Link: Studies in Law, Policy & Society 83 (2020): 23-56. (peer-reviewed)

This article uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours, the article argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place—the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon—the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. The article investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely the entangled histories of white laundresses’ labor and labor activism in Portland, as well as the labor of their competitors—Chinese laundrymen. In so doing, the article offers an intersectional reading of Mullerthat incorporates regulations on Chinese laundries and places the decision in conversation with a long line of anti-Chinese laundry legislation on the West Coast, including that at issue in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). 

Link: California Law Review (2013): 445-519.

*Cited in Kubsch v. Neal, 800 F.3d 783 (7th Cir. 2015), reh’g en banc granted, opinion vacated (Nov. 23, 2015), on reh’g en banc, 838 F.3d 845 (7th Cir. 2016).

*Cited in Brief for the NAACP LDEF as Amicus Curiae, Flowers v. State of Mississippi, 2018 WL 6921334 (U.S. 2018).

Countless academics have examined and discussed the importance of Chambers v. Mississippi in a multitude of areas including compulsory due process, admission of hearsay, third party guilt evidence, false confessions, racial evaluations of hearsay and witnesses, and morally reasonable verdicts. In contrast, this Comment attempts to excavate the account of a rural Mississippi community’s struggle for rights that underlies the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chambers. On its face, the case has no link or reference to the civil rights movement. However, this Comment reveals that local civil rights activists took armed, direct economic action for equal rights in Woodville, Mississippi, and that activism characterized the events that precipitated the June 14, 1969, killing of Officer Aaron Liberty — Woodville’s black police officer. The article concludes by developing two interrelated claims: in the narrative — which takes place in the gap between secured rights and local realities — law is both everywhere and nowhere. National litigation influenced the terms of exchange between the local movement and white opposition, while micromobilizations of the law through local law enforcement continually operated to suppress civil rights activity. At the same time, there was an absence of legal protections for the black community, who in response mobilized an extralegal self-defense group to bolster the power of boycotts and protect black neighborhoods.