Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation

Risa Goluboff’s Vagrant Nation is a masterwork of legal history. The research alone is a remarkable achievement. The topic of the book, the demise of vagrancy laws in the 1960s and early 1970s, provides a wealth of fascinating material, but, as a subject of research, it is frightfully unwieldy. The regulations that constitute what Goluboff terms the “vagrancy law regime” came in many shapes and sizes, only some of them actually labeled vagrancy laws. The common characteristic of these laws, which in one form or another had been on the books for centuries, was that they were all designed to regulate people who were “out of place”—because of their race, sexuality, poverty, political views, or any other category of nonconformity that those in power could think up. Just as unwieldy of a research subject as this vagrancy law regime was the legal reform campaign that brought it down. Goluboff’s protagonists are an eclectic assortment of lawyers engaged in largely uncoordinated litigation efforts. From varied entry points into the story, these lawyers were able to take common advantage of the historical moment of the 1960s, leveraging the decade’s social and cultural upheavals to craft legal arguments that became increasingly persuasive in the courts. Goluboff ranges wide and far to locate the pieces of a potentially elusive topic. Once located, she dives deep into the archival material and scholarly literature.

Criminology · Demise · Nonconformity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Repeal · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Vagrancy · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society