Saturday, October 5, 2019

Prifogle on Seo, "Policing the Open Road"

We were excited to learn of the August 2019 relaunch of the online book review outlet The New Rambler Review, now edited by Cindy Ewing, Connor Ewing, Simon Stern, and Anna Su. And we were particularly pleased to see legal history represented in the recent content under review. Here's an excerpt from (former LHB associate blogger) Emily Prifogle's review of (recent LHB guest blogger) Sarah Seo's Policing the Open Road (2019):
Policing the Open Road is a beautifully written book that moves seamlessly from doctrinal analysis to exploration of themes in popular culture, like Jay-Z’s song, “99 Problems.” The legal history will be of interest to criminal law scholars and historians of policing. Yet, Seo is also particularly adept at clearly explaining legal concepts for those not so versed in Fourth Amendment doctrine, and the book is readily accessible to those more generally curious about how we came to live in a Driving While Black—even Parking While Black—society. Her history of cars and the Fourth Amendment also provides crucial context for considering the public and private nature of new searchable private property like cell phones connected to the public information superhighway. Seo has convinced me that even if the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence solved one generation’s problem, we need to start “defining freedom anew” for this generation (275).
Read on here.

-- Karen Tani