John Rappaport

Print
Essay
Volume 89.2
Symposium Introduction: This Violent City? Urban Violence in Chicago and Beyond
Aziz Z. Huq
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.
John Rappaport
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.

Bartosz Woda provided invaluable help in preparing the charts in this Introduction; we owe him great thanks for his remarkable work. Professor Huq thanks the Frank J. Cicero Fund; Professor Rappaport thanks the Darelyn A. and Richard C. Reed Memorial Fund.

Our modest goal in this Introduction is to assemble some baseline empirics concerning both private violence and state coercion to provide a context for the pieces that follow. In so doing, we aim to mitigate the need for “scene setting” by each paper in the Symposium. Readers of the Symposium will find here a synoptic guide to some basic facts about the distribution and extent of criminal violence, as well as socioeconomic conditions and police activity, in Chicago.

Print
Article
87.3
Some Doubts About “Democratizing” Criminal Justice
John Rappaport
Assistant Professor of Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, University of Chicago Law School.

I am indebted to Monica Bell, Merav Bennett, Stephanos Bibas, Andrew Crespo, Justin Driver, Roger Fairfax, Trevor Gardner, Bernard Harcourt, Emma Kaufman, Brian Leiter, Richard McAdams, Tracey Meares, Martha Nussbaum, Dan Richman, Jocelyn Simonson, Roseanna Sommers, and Fred Smith for terrific comments on drafts. Thanks as well to Will Baude, Genevieve Lakier, Lauren Ouziel, and participants at the Criminal Justice Roundtable, the Junior Criminal Justice Roundtable, the University of Chicago Works-in-Progress Workshop, and the University of Virginia Faculty Workshop for generative conversations. For research assistance, thanks to Merav Bennett, Dylan Demello, Morgan Gehrls, Alli Hugi, Kevin Kennedy, and especially Alex Song. The Darelyn A. and Richard C. Reed Memorial Fund furnished financial support.

For the uninitiated, a brief rehearsal of the facts of the matter: The United States presently incarcerates over two million individuals, with another four million under other forms of correctional supervision.