Redemptive Constitutionalism in the Jury Room and Public Life

Abstract

Redemptive Constitutionalism in the Jury Room and Public Life Mark Golub (bio) Sonali Chakravarti. Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 168 pp. $2500 (pb). ISBN: 9780226654294. It is hard to think of a time, at least since the twentieth century, when public confidence in legal institutions has been lower or threats to the rule of law have been so conspicuously on display. We may view this current era of threat through a lens of nostalgia for a bygone age thought to be less polarized and corrupt, or it may be viewed more cynically, as disillusionment with a form of power that law must simultaneously enact and conceal as part of its legitimizing function; in either case, theorizing about law in these precarious times can take on a kind of paranoid sensibility. One's critique may feel always too small for the scale of the problem, while also at risk of sawing through the branch that holds our weight above something far worse. Each of the books included in this Roundtable bear the trace of such a problematic. Each, in their own way, may be read as responding to the potential for law to be both a check on political power and an expression of that power; a promise of protection from arbitrary rule, but also its most effective institutionalization; a potential remedy for social injustice and also, in its carceral form especially, a brutally efficient regime of racial violence. [End Page 840] In many ways, Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life marks a continuation of Sonali Chakravarti's careful thinking about institutional responses to social crises and systemic injustice. Her first book, Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2014), emphasized the virtue of anger as a beneficial yet potentially disruptive political affect in the transition from apartheid South Africa. Typically thought to conflict with democratic values of rational deliberation and impartiality, anger's disruptive potential in Sing the Rage is also crucially generative. It does not facilitate a "return to normal" after periods of violent upheaval, but instead intervenes to shift the boundaries of responsibility for mass violence and to name society's deep complicity with human rights violations, atrocities, and mass killings. But institutional context is equally important as emotion or affect for Chakravarti, who is attentive to how the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) worked to structure the reception of victim testimony in ways that might contribute to the building of a new and democratic Republic of South Africa. Anger is powerful, Chakravarti reminds us, because it is dangerous, and so "the expression of anger is a reminder of the need for democratic institutions, just as it shows the limits of consensus within them" (176). Legal institutions play a similar role in her new book. Only here, the source of disruption (at once dangerous and necessary) has migrated from the witness stand to the jury room. The book opens with an approving nod to Henry Fonda's heroic performance as Juror #8 in the classic film, 12 Angry Men—although, curiously, Fonda's character remains preternaturally calm, even when facing the angry outbursts of fellow jurors, who would uncritically convict without so much as a pretense of deliberation. Juror #8 is disruptive, then, because he refuses to go along with a legal process that functions mostly like a machine, rubber-stamping the execution of a poor, possibly innocent, Puerto Rican youth. The judge's indifference, the public defender's incompetence, the general attitude of deference to legal professionals on the part of the jury, all must be confronted for justice to prevail. Chakravarti's book aims to provide the tools for just such an intervention, turning this time not to the angry testimony of witnesses but to the cultivation of critical thinking and practical wisdom by citizen-jurors to exercise a judgment "that goes beyond obedience and rule-following" (3). This concept is what Chakravarti calls radical enfranchisement. Introduced both as "a set of skills and topics jurors should be familiar with through civic education before a trial," and as "an orientation toward citizenship relevant for political...