On (Being) Fear: Utah v. Strieff and the Ontology of Affect

Abstract

This article interrogates the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case on lawful police searches, to track the political assumptions that undergird conceptions of the legal boundaries of police search and seizures. Specifically, the author examines how the vestiges of slavery structure both the constitutive elements of how bodily autonomy and freedom from physical invasion is understood under the law. Thus, by employing critical Black Studies in tension with affect theory, this article questions what limits are present in the law that reify, even or especially through dissent, the ontological arrangements of slavery and its afterlife.