Guyora Binder

My recent article, Disbanding Police Agencies, grew out of conversations with my coauthors Tony O’Rourke and Rick Su, regarding the tragic and turbulent events over the past year. It assesses proposals to disband police forces, like that passed by the Minneapolis City Council, from a democratic and institutionalist perspective. Should localities concerned about discriminatory policing and excessive force disband their police forces? This is a more practical strategy than many readers may imagine, that has been used before in American history to reform policing. One reason in favor of using such a strategy today is that discriminatory police departments are often too insulated from democratic oversight to be meaningfully reformed. Yet these same legal impediments to democratic control will also impede efforts to dissolve police forces and start fresh.” SUNY DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR HODGSON RUSS FACULTY SCHOLAR VICE DEAN FOR RESEARCH AND FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

JD, Yale Law School AB, Princeton University

(716) 645-2673 gbinder@buffalo.edu

AREAS OF INTEREST

CRIMINAL LAW JURISPRUDENCE LAW AND LITERATURE

BOOKS Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (with John Kaplan & Robert Weisberg) (Wolters-Kluwer, 9th ed., 2021).

ARTICLES Defunding Police Agencies (with Rick Su & Anthony O’Rourke) 71 Emory Law Journal (forthcoming 2022). Disbanding Police Agencies (with Anthony O’Rourke & Rick Su), 121 Columbia Law Review 1327 (2021).

Judicial Review of Strict Liability Local Ordinances (with Brenner Fissell), 53 Arizona State Law Journal 425 (2021). A Political Interpretation of Vagueness Doctrine (with Brenner Fissell), 2019 Illinois Law Review 1527 (2019). The Puzzle of Inciting Suicide (with Luis Chiesa), 56 American Criminal Law Review 65 (2018).

Unusual: The Death Penalty for Inadvertent Murder (with Brenner Fissell & Robert Weisberg), 93 Indiana Law Journal 549 (2018).

BOOK REVIEWS Book Review, 93 American Literature (forthcoming 2021) (reviewing Karla F. C. Holloway, Legal Fictions (Duke University Press, 2013) and Eric Bachman, Literary Obscenities (Penn State University Press, 2018)). Book Review, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books (Sept. 2020) (reviewing Lawrence Friedman, Crime Without Punishment: Aspects of History of Homocide (Cambridge University Press, 2018)).

Crime and Punishment

Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (Wolters-Kluwer, 9th ed., 2021) provides a comprehensive examination of criminal law under both the Model Penal Code and common law. Interspersed with excerpts that provide social, political, and criminological background to the black letter law, the casebook’s interdisciplinary approach addresses the purposes and limits of punishment and considers the meaning and types of crime.

The ninth edition, co-authored by Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg, and the late John Kaplan, includes new research on the role of constitutional law in the criminalization of homelessness and expanded discussion of racial justice topics including the criminal liability of police for the use of unnecessary lethal force, controversies surrounding citizen’s arrest powers, and the evolution of sexual assault laws.