Bennett Capers’s article Against Prosecutors challenges us to imagine a world where we “turn away from prosecution as we know it,” and shift “power from prosecutors to the people they purport to represent.” In this world, crime victims decide whether to prosecute their own cases, and public prosecutors play a subsidiary role, taking primary responsibility only for cases “where…

When I was a prosecutor, I relished closing arguments, especially standing in front of the jury to deliver my rebuttal to defense attorney summations—plural since many of my trials involved multiple co-defendants and hence multiple defense summations. When I tell my students this, they assume I loved rebuttals for the intellectual one-upmanship. And they’re…

In “Against Prosecutors,” Bennett Capers proposes that we largely abandon the current system of public prosecutions and return to private prosecutions. His goal is to empower the victims of crime to make decisions currently made by public prosecutors—whether to bring charges, what the charges should be, and how the cases should…

In his provocative essay, Against Prosecutors,[1] Professor Bennett Capers contributed to a now-robust conversation that was on the fringes just a decade ago. Although it remains to be seen whether the pendulum will swing away from the engagement with abolitionist theory that intensified in the wake of the May 2020 murder of…

In the summer of 2019, I first heard Bennett Capers describe an early draft of Against Prosecutors. We were at a national conference of criminal law professors, and Capers was presenting to a crowded room. The draft that would turn into Capers’s 2020 Cornell Law Review article posed a novel question: given prosecutors’ role in driving…

In Against Prosecutors, Professor Bennett Capers discusses domestic violence, among other crimes, to propose reforming our current system of public prosecution in favor of a model in which the victim could decide whether to pursue a criminal case and what punishment (if any) her assailant would receive. He invokes the spirit of private prosecution, including the imposition of peace bonds on wife-beaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to “idealize or romanticize the past,” but “to show that the public prosecutor, a ‘historical latecomer,’ is not inevitable…

In Against Prosecutors, Bennett Capers presents thought-provoking arguments for empowering victims in criminal cases. He proposes that victims should be given greater authority to initiate and direct prosecutions of criminal cases, and should have the options to veto prosecutions or to serve as private prosecutors themselves…

At this unprecedented moment for criminal justice in the United States, the spotlight is directed at the “overs”: over-policing, over-prosecution, over-criminalization, and over-incarceration. This focus has led many to support bold anti-carceral reforms designed to curtail criminal law and its enforcement. But activists and other civilians have also expressed concerns about equity and under-enforcement that are often lost in overly simplistic media coverage…

This piece is part of the Reckoning and Reformation symposium, which brings together scholars writing broadly about the law, justice, race, and inequality. The California Law Review published two other pieces as part of this joint effort with other law reviews…

In 2018, the California legislature passed the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act (SSVA), which decriminalized street vending, an immigrant-dominated industry that operates within urban spaces in California and across the United States. Shortly thereafter, Los Angeles County supervisors created a regulatory system that would create formal opportunities for street vendors to sell food products through an…

Public interest law has played a critical role in American social movements and change. Abolitionist societies and lawyers litigated fugitive slave cases that led to the Civil War and the formal end of slavery. Lawyers figured prominently in organized efforts toward political reform thereafter. These include, but are not limited to, the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth…