Schwartz on Preventing Constitutional Wrongs by Police

Joanna C. Schwartz (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - School of Law) has posted An Even Better Way (California Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

The final session of Berkeley Law School’s symposium, "Section 1983 and Police Use of Force: Building a Civil Justice Framework," asked the persistent and profound question: “How Do We Reform the Law in Light of What We Know?” In various law review articles and most comprehensively in the final chapter of my book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, I have proposed some possible answers to that question—a set of reforms aimed at our system of legal accountability. But these answers are incomplete. Although these reforms would better enable people to vindicate their rights in court, they are not up to the task of preventing many of the harms people sue about, as well as the harms for which people never seek remedy. If a better system of accountability for constitutional violations is “A Better Way,” as I’ve titled the last chapter of Shielded, it would be “An Even Better Way” to avoid rights violations altogether. In this Essay, I consider possible paths towards that even better way, situating front-end solutions in relation to the sorts of back-end accountability-type proposals I offer in Shielded and considering how to prioritize among the seemingly unending swirl of possibilities, suggestions and demands about how to move forward.