The Ideological Origins of the Right to Counsel

Forthcoming  68 South Carolina Law Review__ (2016).

I am pleased to announce that my paper will be published in Volume 1 of the South Carolina Law Review. The paper's abstract is below:

The defense counsel is a paramount actor in modern criminal trials, but this was not always the case. Indeed the allowance of counsel to felony defendants can be traced to only a few hundred years ago, a relatively modern innovation in the area of legal history. This essay examines the intellectual origins of the right to counsel, which it situates in the era of the English Revolution. Drawing on pamphlet literature, cases, and statutes from the Seventeenth-Century in both England and North America it argues that the right originated from a fear of unfairness brought on by a mistrust of the law among puritan reformers who worried that without the guiding hand of counsel defendants would be wrongly convicted. The right to assistance of counsel is found in nascent form in the Body of Liberties of Massachusetts Bay, which is the first Anglo-American legal code to remove the prohibition on defense counsel. Although initially opposed by the colony’s leaders the code reflected their desire to reform the Common Law and their attempt to blend religious law with English law. The intellectual origin of the right to counsel thus also represents the transatlantic circulation of legal ideas.

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Law, Culture, and Society Workshop, at The University of Chicago on 7 June 2010.

Law and Society Association, Annual Meeting

I presented a paper, Transforming the Common Law: Criminal Law Reform in Early Massachusetts Bay,” at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association held in New Orleans. This paper is an overview of my dissertation and argues that the Puritans in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay Colony were actually far more lenient than their contemporary Englishmen. An illustration of this is the end of the 'Bloody Code,' or capital punishment for property crimes, starting at the founding of the colony. Although banishment and capital punishment were used in the colony they were an outlier with the most common punishments being fines and shamming (pillory, reading of name at town meetings, admonishments). A previous version of this paper was presented a the Early Modern Workshop of the University of Chicago.

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Law, Culture, and Humanities

I presented an updated version of my article, Community Reparations as a Remedy for Dignity Takings Following Police Misconduct, at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Law, Culture, and Humanities at the University of Connecticut Law School in Hartford, Connecticut. 

Southeast-Southwest Persons of Color Conference, FAMU College of Law

I presented, Community Reparations as a Remedy for Dignity Takings Following Police Misconduct at the Southeast-Southwest Persons of Color Conference held at Florida A & M College of Law in Orlando, Florida. This was a followup paper to my Howard Law Journal article. This articles takes the next logical step in the argument, asserting that reparations must be paid by cities to targeted communities of police misconduct in order to truly provide a remedy. The best way to implement reparations is in conjunction with existing DOJ procedures as it would provide teeth to the system, which currently only mandates increased training or oversight of police officers. Such reparations would be paid in the form of increased services or public amenities to the effected neighborhoods. They could include things such as, increased afters school programs, park maintenance, school maintenance, or community centers. This would provide a remedy that helps decrease violence while at the same time validating the harm that was inflicted upon the community by state actors.