One of the cases we studied was the famous McDonald's Coffee Lawsuit. Professor McCann was featured in this video!
This quarter, I took LSJ 363, Law in Society which was taught by Professor Michael McCann. It was a course that I saw becoming increasingly relevant, especially with the the killing of George Floyd sparking riots and protests around the country. Some key things the course covered were legal mobilization and the factors determining whether or not people choose to mobilize the law, and the violence of the law as a bureaucracy. The course was structured around daily readings which Professor McCann dived deeper into during lectures, and section was a time for discussion of the week's readings and lectures.
The second half of the class actually had some focus on police brutality and the "Thin Blue Line". If excessive force is continually used by the police, the words of the law begin to have less power.
I think the most important thing I've learned from this course is that we live in a world where perfect justice does not exist. In one of our readings about law's violence by Robert Cover, Cover writes that the “balance of terror” represented in trends of legal violence (policing, incarceration, and capital punishment) is just about right. I did not agree with his conclusion. The disproportionate subjectivity of various communities to the law are one issue, and the excessive use of force another. However, I believe that a stronger underlying issue is the blurring of lines when it comes to determining “innocence” under the law and the systems in place that nurture this. Innocent people must plead guilty for a more forgiving sentence. Only the wealthy can afford the best lawyers to advocate for them and the privilege to plead not guilty if they so choose. Police stops are often based off of pre-conceived stereotypes (whether consciously or unconsciously). Innocence is therefore dependent on the systems in place rather than Truth.