In November 2016, Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general, praised then president-elect Donald Trump’s 1989 comments about the Central Park Five as demonstrating his commitment to “law and order.” This is a striking understanding of law and order, not only because the teenagers were, in fact, completely innocent, but because Trump’s words left no room for due process in the case. Norms of law and order in a liberal democratic state are fundamentally fair. Sessions’s use of the phrase “law and order” instead seems to refer to a system of laws that declares young black men to be, in their
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