Jonathon Booth
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401 UCB
2450 Kittredge Loop Road
Wolf Law Building
Boulder, CO 80309
Office: 451
E-mail: jonathon.booth@colorado.edu
Curriculum Vitae: View (PDF format)
Bio:Jonathon Booth is a historian of democracy, race, law, and policing in the United States. He teaches courses including Criminal Law, American Legal History, and Law and History of Policing.
Jonathon's research reaches from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and focuses on the practical impact of law and its enforcement - in other words, how the law tangibly affects Americans. His recent articles include The Cycle of Delegitimization: Lessons From Dred Scott on the Relationship Between the Supreme Court and the Nation, 51 UC Law Constitutional Quarterly 5 (2023) and Policing after Slavery: Race, Law, and Resistance in Atlanta, forthcoming in the University of Colorado Law review.
He is currently working on two articles. The first examines the history of the so-called Satanic Panic in the 1980's during which dozens of people were convicted of child sex abuse with no physical evidence and sentenced to decades in prison. The vast majority were later exonerated. The article examines the causes of the original panic and asks whether current moral panics, especially around transgender people, could lead to similar injustices in the future. The second article, titled The Legal Architecture of Emancipation, describes the full range of new laws passed by Southern states after Reconstruction that, although formally race neutral, served to cement white political and economic power. He is also at the early stages of a book project titled Policing the Rural South, 1850-2020.
Before coming to Colorado, Jonathon was the Legal History Fellow at the Harvard History Design Studio and clerked for the Hon. Barrington D. Parker on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Hon. Kevin McNulty on the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2021 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2019. He received his B.A. in History and Economics, joint honours, from McGill University.
Forthcoming
| Policing after Slavery: Race, Crime, and Resistance in Atlanta, 96 Colo. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024). |
Articles
| The Cycle of Delegitimization: Lessons From Dred Scott on the Relationship Between the Supreme Court and the Nation, 51 UC Const. Q. 5 (2023). |
| Ending Forced Labor in ICE Detention Centers: A New Approach, 34 Geo. Immigr. L.J. 573 (2020). |
| Capitalism, Anti-Blackness, and the Law: A Very Short History, 35 Harv. BlackLetter L.J. 5 (2019). |
Other Publications
| Regulating Freedom in Georgia's County Court, SHGAPE Blog, April 19, 2023. |
| New Sheriff in Town, The Drift, Issue 3, February 3, 2021. |
| How Private Prisons Profit from Forced Labor, Current Affairs, October 26, 2020. |
Book Chapters
| The Impact of the American Civil War on Political Writing, in Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol. 1, (Evelyn O'Callaghan and Tim Watson, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2020). |
Book Reviews
| Review of Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US by Julian Go, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, April 2024. |
| Post-industrial Property Law: Review of A Detroit Story: Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality by Claire W. Herbert, 8 J. L. Prop. & Soc?y 1 (2023). |
Courses:
| Fall 2024 | Special Topics | LAWS 6708-804 |