Tracey Meares
Tracey L. Meares is Walton Hale Hamilton Professor at Yale Law School. Before arriving at Yale Law School, she was Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School. She has held positions clerking for the Honorable Harlington Wood, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. Since 2004, she has served on the Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council Standing Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. Additionally, she has served on two National Research Council Review Committees: one to review research on police policy and practices and another more recently to review the National Institute of Justice. In November of 2010, she was named by Attorney General Eric Holder to sit on the Department of Justice's newly-created Science Advisory Board. Professor Meares's teaching and research interests focus on criminal procedure and criminal law policy, with a particular emphasis on empirical investigation of these subjects. Her writings on such issues as crime prevention and community capacity building are concertedly interdisciplinary and reflect a civil society approach to law enforcement that builds upon the interaction between law, culture, social norms, and social organization. She has written widely on these topics in both the academic and trade press. Meares has been especially interested as of late in teaching and writing about communities, police legitimacy and legal policy, and she has lectured on this topic extensively across the country to audiences of academics, lay people, and police professionals. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
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Working Papers by Tracey Meares
about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state
action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed
conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of
policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing.
Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people
who experience state authority in our time through policing characterize
democratic governance by mapping citizens’ experiences with and views
of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their
experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue
that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely
unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations
of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially
recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants
characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people’s
everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We
call this Janus-faced interaction with the state “distorted responsiveness,”
and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of
police to our participants’ theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships
with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing
a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how
individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences
with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can
develop a theory of the state from below.
Drafts by Tracey Meares
about policing between individuals in communities where this form of state
action is concentrated. Based on more than 800 recorded and transcribed
conversations across 12 neighborhoods in five cities, the largest collection of
policing narratives to date, we analyze patterns in discourse around policing.
Our goal in closely analyzing these conversations is to uncover how people
who experience state authority in our time through policing characterize
democratic governance by mapping citizens’ experiences with and views
of the state, how they judge the responsiveness of authorities, and their
experience-informed critiques of democracy. Methodologically, we argue
that observing through Portals real conversations of ordinary people largely
unmediated by the researcher allows us to transcend certain limitations
of traditional, survey-based techniques and to study politics in beneficially
recursive ways. Theoretically, we demonstrate that Portals participants
characterize police as contradictory—everywhere when surveilling people’s
everyday activity and nowhere if called upon to respond to serious harm. We
call this Janus-faced interaction with the state “distorted responsiveness,”
and we demonstrate the organic connection of this characterization of
police to our participants’ theorization of their broader relationship with the state. We argue that their understandings of their own relationships
with the key state institutions in their lives are foundational to developing
a fuller understanding of democracy in action. In short, by focusing on how
individuals experience citizenship in the city through ordinary experiences
with municipal bureaucrats who figure prominently in their lives, we can
develop a theory of the state from below.