So I'd love you to tell our audience a bit about that, if you're willing.

Of course.

Just to flag, though, before I get into the piece that I contributed, both Professor Charles and I also contributed essays to the collection in addition to editing it.

But as a history teacher, and just to flag for your students, We're very fortunate here at Harvard Law School to have on the faculty some truly luminous historians, and they wrote for the collection.

And there's something really grounding, I think, to be on a faculty and then to get to read the work of colleagues who can help you situate today's chaos in a history of change.

And so Annette Gordon-Reed, who is a prominent prize-winning historian here on the faculty, she writes about the history of the fight over who gets to be American.

And the question, the battle over, does being American mean that you believe in American ideals? As the Declaration seems to suggest, that we are a nation of laws and principle and that's what brings us together.

It's wonderful.

It's a good touch point.

It's a touch point, and it's also a good organizer for my thoughts around how to think about being part of this faculty.

Or maybe it's better to say, this is how I have chosen to think about being part of this faculty.

Because you could do it lots of different ways.

So...

I think it's fair to say that every member of the Harvard Law faculty is very good at something.

That's why they invited us to show up.

Talk a little bit about how you see the world there.

Tell us about what was happening and the point that you're trying to make with that.

Yeah, the point is that in Baltimore and in so many communities around the country, we have seen for decades what happens when rule of law is eroded, when we do not insist on lawful, fair, egalitarian and just treatment of ordinary people.

I think so many Americans of all different political stripes were shocked to learn to see on.

with her own eyes, the violence and the unlawfulness with which ICE has been treating immigrants.

But unfortunately, Baltimore City, residents of Baltimore City have been familiar with that kind of violent, frightening, unlawful treatment at the hands of Baltimore police over the history of the city.

The story that I talk about in the essay is from the Gun Trace Task Force.

scandal, which as many Baltimoreans know, there was essentially a gang of corrupt Baltimore police officers who did the sorts of things that ICE has shocked America with, that they terrorized neighborhoods, they arrested the innocent, they engaged in unlawful activity.

How and why?

Do you feel that the current administration has damaged the concept of the rule of law?

So thank you for asking me that question, because it is what I write about in the essay for this book.

So let's take a step back.

In the criminal system, which is my area of expertise, rule of law... has always been shaky for ordinary Americans.

So when I was a public defender in Baltimore, as I have done my work and scholarship about the criminal system over and over again, we see how the criminal system abandons rule of law for ordinary people, for the vulnerable, for people who don't have the resources, the money, or the social capital to fight back.

And so I think one of the things that's happening in our political discourse right now and our legal discourse is a kind of a romanticization of the American legal system as if somehow it was all working perfectly until this moment.

And then the Trump administration broke it.

So my question to you is, how do we end the elusiveness?

Mm-hmm.

Um, uh, so, and f- fighting in that arena, um, of course it was depressing.

Of course it was terrible.

Uh, meeting in broom closets in, in the Baltimore City Detention lockup with my clients because they didn't have, there weren't meeting rooms.

Young, w- young, talented people who were looking at years of incarceration because, um, uh, essentially because of the economic opportunities and the lack thereof in the neighborhoods that they lived in.

Of course it was terrible.

And yet there is something, again, speaking for myself, the law is so powerful, and it meant that someone like me, I'm not magic.

Yeah

If you, in your research and in looking back, And do you do you look back and see a time when our criminal justice system was working in a way that you could say, all right, they were getting it right then? Or and I'm giving kind of a very biased question, or has it always just been so messed up that we just keep wash, rinsing and repeating? What do you see from a historical perspective?

Yeah, I think I'd say there's a big, big mess on aisle seven.

If anything, the excitement and the invitation of working in the criminal system is that there's so much we can do that we haven't done.

The trajectory of our criminal system has been from a highly decentralized and therefore local and often I want to say quietly oppressive in the sense that we didn't see it.

We didn't know.

There was no way to know what was going on in all 50 states to this enormous behemoth of governance institution that actually We have better tools today to look at it, to critique it, to gather data, to have fights over it than we ever have.

And so I'm kind of a half-full person, which helps you when you're sitting in the Baltimore City Detention Center, which is...

So talk to us about where that came from.

Or did you was it very open ended? What did it sound like on your end to solicit these thousand word essays?

Well, you're right.

It was an unusual pitch.

And it is true that some of our colleagues looked at us a little sideways when we pitched it, because it isn't something that a law school like Harvard, frankly, has ever done.

And certainly not in our 200 years, Harvard Law School has never done something like this.

We said, this is a moment.

It's a moment where the institutions of law and governance in the United States are changing radically.

But yeah, I mean, what would it look like in, you know, 1926?