: American policing faces a crisis of legitimacy. A key source of this crisis is a widespread police practice commonly endorsed by police leaders to fight crime. This is the investigatory stop, used to check out people who seem suspicious and to seize illegal drugs and guns and make arrests. Using data from an original scientific survey of drivers in the Kansas City metropolitan area, the authors show that racial disparities in police stops are concentrated in investigatory vehicle stops. In these stops, but not others, officers disproportionately stop African Americans and question and search them. The overwhelming majority of people stopped in this way are innocent, and the experience causes psychological harm and erodes trust in and cooperation with the police. Many of the most controversial police shootings during the past two years occurred in these stops. Reforming this practice is an essential step toward restoring trust in the police. Practitioner Points• Although evidence of their effectiveness is not clear, investigatory police stops (commonly using minor violations as a pretext for a more searching inquiry) are widely used by local police departments as a crimefighting tactic.• Most people stopped in investigatory stops are innocent, yet they are subjected to intrusive questioning (e.g., "Why are you in the neighborhood?") and searches, leading to feelings of fear and of being "violated." • Overuse of investigatory police stops erodes trust in, and cooperation with, the police, especially among African Americans, who are especially likely to be stopped.• There is insufficient oversight of the practice, as many investigatory stops yield no citation and so are not presently recorded or reported.• To enable oversight of this practice, law enforcement agencies should require officers to record and report all stops they make, including the race and ethnicity of the driver and whether a warning or citation is issued; these data should be analyzed to check for patterns of racial disparity. Surveys of satisfaction with police services should include questions regarding residents' experiences in police stops, including stops for minor violations. Charles R. Epp Steven Maynard-Moody Donald Haider-MarkelUniversity of Kansas P olicing in the United States is in crisis, a "perfect storm" of popular protest and media coverage of egregious violations (Weitzer 2015 , 475). Since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, protests have erupted in Baltimore, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Madison, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, Tulsa, and such smaller places as Hempstead, Texas; North Charleston, South Carolina; Pasco, Washington; and Stonewall, Mississippi. The relationship between the police and these communities, so essential to public safety and the rights and dignity of members of the public, is strained, if not broken. Nor is the problem isolated locally. A recent national survey found that 84 percent...

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Although constitutional protection for rights is increasingly popular, there is little systematic research on the extent to which bills of rights affect the process of government. This article examines the effects a bill of rights may be expected to produce, and then uses a quasi-experimental design to analyze the effects of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the Canadian Supreme Court's agenda. The data suggest that the Charter indeed has influenced the Court's agenda, although the effects are more limited than generally recognized. More important, the data suggest that a number of the influences often attributed to the Charter likely resulted instead from the growth of what I call the support structure for legal mobilization, consisting of various resources that enable litigants to pursue rights-claims in court. The political significance of a bill of rights, then, depends on factors in civil society that are independent of constitutional structure.

Numerous commentaries and empirical studies have suggested that while a substantial proportion of incoming law students are interested in careers in “public interest law,” by the time they graduate only a small minority take jobs in that sector. However, none of these studies have been based on a panel study having data on both job preference before students began their studies and information about the actual first job taken. This Research Note fills that gap by updating an earlier study of the University of Wisconsin Law School class of 1976. We find that while over half the respondents expressed some interest in public interest law before beginning law study, only 13% actually took a job in legal aid, as a public defender, or in a nonprofit organization. Analysis of respondents who initially expressed an interest in nontraditional jobs shows that political orientation and participation in a social action law program during law school are the strongest predictors of who in fact took a nontraditional job.

This article examines why groups seeking social reform in the United States (and elsewhere) commonly have resorted to litigation, and whether (and how) court-made law is an instrument of social reform. First, what is “law” and what is “social reform?” These definitions take on significance in light of the ongoing debate over judicial role and capacity generated first by the Supreme Court's social-policy interventions under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, and, more recently, by the growing role of courts virtually worldwide and its close link with civil rights and civil liberties litigation. In this context, when scholars have examined whether “law” may be used as a tool of “social reform,” they generally have meant whether judge-made law, particularly in cases brought by social movement litigators, improves the conditions of the disadvantaged groups targeted by such litigation, particularly racial minorities, women, inmates, and people living in poverty.