Professor Marissa Jackson Sow’s paper, Protect and Serve, has been accepted for publication in the California Law Review (forthcoming June 2022). A description of the article follows:

Via the theories of whiteness as contract and the racial contract to policing, Protect and Serve uses critical contract theory to challenge the basic assumption—undergirded by constitutional, civil rights, and human rights law—that Black people in the United States are entitled to due process and equal protection when they are in contact with the police or other law enforcement officer. Instead, the paper advances the claim that the mandate that police “protect and serve” does not apply to Black people in actuality, notwithstanding the provisions of constitutional and statutory law, because they are the objects of racial contracting rather than participants therein. The police are charged with protecting the racial contract and serving the contract’s signatories; accordingly, they enforce the contract’s terms, requiring them to specifically target Black people for surveillance, harassment, deprivation, and even death, lest the contract be subject to breach or other interference.