Thanks to the diligent work of the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University and a generous grant from Columbia World Project’s Center for Political Economy, Cities of Bail is now live and able to be explored. Check out the exploration page for Albuquerque, New Mexico, here. More cities, data, and analysis, particularly from criminal charging records, will be posted in the coming weeks.
It was a pleasure to return to the American Bail System seminar last term at Yale Law School. I learned a lot from the innovative projects the students took on, and I hope to see some of those projects in print soon.
Bail Syllabus
Many thanks to Henry Goldberg, CLS ’23, for his assistance with census data and ArcGIS mapping. Here is an initial map of around 650 mortgages securing bail bonds in Newark (Essex County) and Jersey City (Hudson County), New Jersey, from the year 2000 until major bail reforms were implemented in the 2017. The map is shaded by density of African American population according to the most recent census data. More work forthcoming in the Cities of Bail project, which will soon be hosted by the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University.
Initial map of 800 mortgages used to secure a bail bond in Albuquerque, NM between 2000 and 2020 for the Cities of Bail project.
I’m excited to once again offer a seminar on the American bail system, the focus of my next academic project. The tentative syllabus is below, although if the course unfolds as it did last year, there will be many breaking developments to add in the final weeks.
Bail Syllabus
David Dudley Field has often been depicted as lone genius. That image served a political purpose when the architects of federal procedure sought to cast Field as a prophetic voice crying in a wilderness of antimodern practice. See especially Charles E. Clark, Address on the Proposed Rules of Civil Procedure, American Bar Association Journal, 22 (1936):787 (“Nevertheless, even Field was a lone worker, who carried through, by sheer force of his own intellectual strength, changes at best only half-heartedly supported, and often opposed even after their adoption, by his colleagues of the bench and bar.”). On the contrary, Field was joined by a host of what political science literature calls “policy entrepreneurs”—official and unofficial agents who frame political problems and propose, lobby, and advertise for the legislative “solutions” to those problems. See Luc Bernier and Taieb Hafsi, “The Changing Nature of Public Entrepreneurship,” Public Administration Review, 67 (2007):488-503; Michael Mintrom, “Policy Entrepreneurs and the Diffusion of Innovation,” American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997):738-70.
The following work-in-progress tracks the many code commissions and legislative advocates of codification during the Field Code era. Nineteenth-century legal historians often focusing on sparring with Morton Horwitz over the elite, “orthodox” defenders of the common law. See Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (Oxford 1994); Kunal Parker, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America (Cambridge 2011); David Rabban, Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Trans-Atlantic Turn to History (Cambridge 2013). But as yet we know far too little about the equally elite supposedly “heterodox” advocates of codification and reform. This list provides a place to start.
In 1874, President Grant appointed the North Carolina lawyer Victor Clay Barringer to be the American representative to the International Court of Alexandria, Egypt, one of the first modern international courts intended to be a permanent tribunal for claims arising from international commerce. Barringer had a colorful history. Scion of a respected southern family, Barringer had harbored the Confederate president Jefferson Davis on his attempted flight to Georgia in the waning days of the Civil War. In 1868, Barringer served on a state code commission with the northern radical Republican “carpetbagger” Albion Tourgee and the the southern convert to Republicanism William Rodman. Rodman and Barringer became close friends, and the letter below comes from the Rodman papers at the East Carolina University archives. Barringer presents a fascinating account of international litigation in Alexandria, the new court system, the clash with native Islamic law, and the irony that Barringer was now involved in a second effort (after postbellum North Carolina) to impose foreign laws on an unreceptive population.
North Carolina Code Commission, ca. 1868. Victor C. Barringer, William B. Rodman, Albion W. Tourgee. The original image can be found in the Albion Tourgee collection at the Chautauqua Historical Society, Westfield, NY.
In this series of posts I have been greatly aided by Lincoln Mullen, assistant professor at George Mason University and a frequent collaborator with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media there. You can find additional information on this post, including all the coding where we “show our work,” at its associated RPub.
Since my last post, I’ve pulled together about thirty more codes, OCR’d them, and cleaned up the resulting text for comparison. This larger sample size allows for more sophisticated comparison than the one-off density plots, but the basic computation remains the same. With the density plot experiment, we asked “how much of the text in X code matches the text in Y code, and where are are those matches distributed in X code?”
Now instead of comparing one jurisdiction with another single jurisdiction, we can compare all codes to each other all at once and and graph the percentage of matching n-grams between each code: Continue reading
