Virtual Event: Devon W. Carbado [CANCELED]

Update

This event has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to reschedule. 

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes DEVON W. CARBADO—the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law—for a discussion of his newest book Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by pre-ordering a copy of Unreasonable on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Unreasonable

The summer of 2020 will be remembered as an unprecedented, watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality. Published on the second anniversary of the global protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Unreasonable is a groundbreaking investigation of the role that the law—and the U.S. Constitution—play in the epidemic of police violence against Black people.

In this crucially timely book, celebrated legal scholar Devon W. Carbado explains how the Fourth Amendment became ground zero for regulating police conduct—more important than Miranda warnings, the right to counsel, equal protection and due process. Fourth Amendment law determines when and how the police can make arrests, and it determines the precarious line between stopping Black people and killing Black people.

A leading light in the critical race studies movement, Carbado looks at how that text, in the last four decades, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect police officers, not African Americans; how it sanctions search and seizure as well as profiling; and how it has become, ultimately, an amendment of life and death.

Accessible, radical, and essential reading, Unreasonable sheds light on a rarely understood dimension of today’s most pressing issue.

Praise for Unreasonable

“Devon Carbado cuts to the heart of the problem of over-policing and police violence in communities of color: the law itself. Unreasonable should permanently shift our discussion from bad apples to bad jurisprudence—and sets the stage for the most important new front in the battle for Black lives.” —Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director, African American Policy Forum

“Unreasonable heralds a lifetime achievement of cutting-edge work by Devon Carbado. Come to this brilliant and engaging book for its full blast takedown of the Supreme Court for authorizing police violence and abuse. Stay for Carbado’s eloquent plea to activists—and all concerned citizens—about who to resist, and how. A combustible mix of righteous anger and common sense, Unreasonable is fire.” —Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men

“Unreasonable is a searing indictment of race and policing in the United States. Professor Devon Carbado explains how the law gives police tremendous, unchecked power. His account of that power is the clearest, most forceful explanation I have seen about what the failure to constrain the police means for people’s lives.” —Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley School of Law