Criminal Law and Urban Disorder: From Vagrancy Law to Stop and Frisk

Catalog description

This course will examine key legal decisions that have shaped the policing of low-level crimes in cities from before vagrancy laws were ruled unconstitutional in the early 1970s to the rise of quality of life policing in the 1990s. We will also focus on the role that community groups, real estate interests, city and state officials and municipal police departments have played in defining and addressing urban disorder.