Seven years ago, I published an argument that challenged one of the legal system’s most familiar assumptions: that the “reasonable person” can always be treated as culturally neutral.
In The Reasonable Black Person Standard in Criminal Law: Impartiality, Justice and the Social Sciences, I argued that Black and white Americans can experience law enforcement and the criminal justice system differently—and that those differences can matter when courts ask what a reasonable person would have done, believed or feared.
Why I wrote it
The reasonable-person standard is designed to create objectivity. But objectivity can become incomplete when it assumes that everyone enters the same encounter with the same history, the same expectations and the same relationship to authority.
My concern was not that courts should abandon reasonableness. It was that reasonableness should be honest about context. If two groups have materially different experiences with policing, suspicion and institutional power, then a standard that ignores those differences may reproduce bias while calling itself neutral.
Seven years later, the question has not disappeared
Since the article was published in 2019, the national conversation around policing, pretrial justice, race and institutional legitimacy has only become more visible. My own professional path also changed. I later served as a North Carolina magistrate, worked more deeply in behavioral health and reentry, and completed doctoral research focused on family support and successful reentry.
Those experiences did not make the original question smaller. They made it more practical: What happens when legal standards meet real people whose experiences of the system are not interchangeable?
When scholarship leaves the journal
One of the clearest signs that an academic idea has entered a larger legal conversation is when later advocates begin using it. In 2025, an amicus curiae brief filed in Wisconsin Supreme Court proceedings in State v. Stetzer cited my article while arguing that “reasonable person” analysis should account for the perspectives and experiences of people of color in interactions with law enforcement.
That citation matters to me not because a citation is an award, but because it shows the work is being used. Scholarship has the greatest value when it helps someone frame a question more clearly, challenge an assumption or build a better argument.
Where I would take the argument today
Today I would place even greater emphasis on the intersection between law, behavioral health, trauma, family, race and institutional decision-making. A person’s response to police, court involvement or authority may be shaped by far more than the facts visible in a case file. Experience affects perception. Trauma affects behavior. Family and community history affect trust. Systems that ignore those realities often mistake context for character.
That does not eliminate accountability. It improves the quality of the analysis.
The work continues
The original article remains part of my permanent scholarly record, and the full PDF is now available directly on this site. I will also use Insights to revisit older scholarship as new cases, research and lived experience give us reasons to ask the questions again.
Read the article page and full PDF →
Related: Dissertation & Academic Work · Journal Articles · Speaking