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Exception to Excess: Tactical Use of the Law by Outgroups in Bias Crime Legislation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Sean Robertson
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Abstract

US bias crime jurisprudence follows the discrimination model and ejects “hate” from scrutiny. It is suggestive of improvements that should be made to Canadian law insofar as it also better tracks the enactment of discrimination against difference occasioned in the everyday. Criminal law, however, remains weak at preventing crime. And where the law requires evidence of discrimination, it iterates the stereotypes and social backdrop of hate crime. But this view on law and culture underestimates how outgroups may produce countermeanings and influence the law. Turning to the more material basis of identity, neoconservatism has given the law a broad ambit whereby coercion as opposed to investment in human capacities is promoted as the means to social order. Where scholars argue that discursive collaboration with retributionist policy requires outgroups to pursue cultural revalorization, given the decreasing freedom under the contemporary authoritarian paradigm, I argue that they must also pursue distributional justice.

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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , Spring 2012 , pp. 456 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2012 

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