essays
Reimagining the Public Defender, The New York Review of Books, December 2, 2021
Racism on the Road, The New York Review of Books, July 23, 2020
What Cars Can Teach Us About New Policing Technologies, The New York Review Daily, October 12, 2019
Sur la route, la police est reine, La Monde Diplomatique, August 2019 (English version, Price of Freedom on the Road, November 2019)
On the Road, Police Power Has Few Limits, The Atlantic, July 14, 2019
If Overpolicing Happened to Everyone, Cato Unbound, April 19, 2019
From Courtesy, to Discretion . . . to Heightened Police Power, Cato Unbound, April 8, 2019
op-eds
Police Officers Shouldn’t Be the Ones to Enforce Traffic Laws, The New York Times, April 15, 2021
How the Car Industry Drove the Growth of Police and “Discretionary” Policing, USA Today, March 22, 2021
Police Reform Won’t Work Unless It Involves Federal and State Governments, Washington Post, July 7, 2020 (with Dan Richman)
Why We Can — and Must — Create a Fairer System of Traffic Enforcement, Washington Post, May 15, 2019
Why Our Response to the Starbucks Arrests Must Go Beyond Race, Washington Post, April 23, 2018
How the Fight Over Civil Forfeiture Lays Bare the Contradictions in Modern Conservatism, Washington Post, July 24, 2017
A Bullet Can Cross the Border. Can the Constitution? The Supreme Court Won’t Say. Washington Post, June 27, 2017
Governor Shouldn’t Sign Smoking-Fine Bill, Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 23, 2016 (with Sarah Milov)
blog posts
Policing the Automobile: “Private” Transit in “Public” Spaces? The Metropole, April 20, 2020
History’s Failures and Historians’ Duties, Legal History Blog, May 31, 2019
New Stories about the Warren Court, Legal History Blog, May 21, 2019
Narrative as a Mode of Argument, Legal History Blog, May 10, 2019
A Book Greater than the Sum of Its Chapters, Legal History Blog, May 6, 2019
The Future of Books? Legal History Blog, May 2, 2019
academic writings
How Federalism Built the FBI, Sustained Local Police, and Left Out the States, Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (with Daniel Richman, 2022)
User’s Guide to History, in Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism, edited by Shauhin Talesh et al. (Edward Elgar, 2021)
Charles Reich and the Legal History of Privacy, Touro Law Review (symposium essay, 2020)
The Originalist Road Not Taken in Kansas v. Glover, ACS Supreme Court Review (2019-2020)
Democratic Policing before the Due Process Revolution, Yale Law Journal, vol. 128 (2019)
The New Public, Yale Law Journal, vol. 125 (2016)
Antinomies and the Automobile: A New Approach to Criminal Justice Histories, Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 38 (2013)
The Science of the Mind and the Practical Science of the Law, Law & History Review, vol. 26 (2008) (with John F. Witt)
A Shattered Dream: The American Law Institute and the Drafting of the International Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson Law Review, vol. 30 (2008)
Battle of the Branches: An Empirical Analysis of Education Lawsuits in the United States, Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems, vol. 41 (2008) (with Joy Chia)