Over the past year plus, sociology, the discipline in which I have a PhD, has been getting an unusual amount of attention. Alice Goffman, a young sociologist at the University of Wisconsin was widely covered by the mainstream media for the importance and promise of her research when her book,
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, was released in 2014.
On the Run is an ethnography of how the war on crime affects a group of young black men in a Philadelphia neighborhood. It was well-reviewed in many publications, with Malcolm Gladwell
describing it in the
New Yorker as "extraordinary." Then, Northwestern Law School Professor Steven Lubet started a master class in how to use attention to someone else's work to get attention for yourself. Let me be clear: I have a dog in this fight. Alice Goffman was a few years behind me in graduate school, and she's a friend. Precisely because of that, I have until now mostly steered clear of the public discussion of her work. But because Lubet is not only attacking my friend and my discipline but the idea that we should take seriously accounts of the lives of young black men
even when they tell us uncomfortable things about the police and courts, I'm done sitting this one out. It's worth a look at what's really going on here, below.
Goffman's book had drawn some criticism for being a book focused on the policing of young black men written by a white author, with critics arguing she should have addressed those issues more extensively. But that was polite debate compared to Lubet's recent efforts. Lubet first floated a series of accusations against Goffman's work at New Rambler Review. Of those accusations, one got him a promotion to publication at the more famous New Republic. Lubet highlighted a passage in the methodological appendix of On the Run in which Goffman describes participating in a late-night drive to look for the killer of one of her research subjects who'd become a friend, a young man she gives the pseudonym Chuck. Of her participation, Goffman wrote, "At the time and certainly in retrospect, my desire for vengeance scared me, more than the shootings I'd witnessed." Lubet argued that her act constituted conspiracy to commit murder for which she could face felony charges—charges he seemed in his writing to be actively trying to drum up.
Beyond that, Lubet suggested that Goffman had fabricated significant details in her work or at a minimum believed falsehoods told by her subjects, using her response to Chuck's killing to boost those claims. Those accusations of fabrication took off, including coverage in the New York Times, then were largely laid to rest by New York magazine writer Jesse Singal tracking down some of her subjects, who fundamentally confirmed Goffman's account; in fact, Singal wrote, at "several points during my conversations ... they would spontaneously confirm details from the book before I could even ask about them." Singal had to work to track down Goffman's subjects because she has worked hard to keep their identities secret to protect them, so that they don't face criminal charges or job loss for activities she described. Where Singal is respectful of that protection—a central part of the code of ethics Goffman, as a sociologist and ethnographer, is bound to—Lubet has taken to actively threatening it.
His early efforts having not panned out, Lubet came back for another crack at Chuck's death and its aftermath, only now he's talking less about felony charges and more about whether Goffman's account of police behavior in the hospital in the immediate aftermath of Chuck's death matches police accounts of the same, plus ethnographic ethics, plus ... who even knows. It's tricky to talk coherently about Lubet's criticisms because they keep shifting—one gets answered and he slides to something different enough to sound plausible. He's throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, but the overall project involves finding reasons we shouldn't believe what Goffman has written about lives under police surveillance. Even though it ties directly to familiar stories from Ferguson, from Baltimore, from too many other cities to name, Lubet is looking to sow doubt, repeatedly attempting to use police denials of practices Goffman describes to argue that her accounts couldn't possibly be accurate. If she's not lying, she's being lied to by her subjects about the treatment they face. After all, the police said that's not how they operate! They wouldn't lie to us!
If we believe it's important to research the effects of intensive policing, heavy court fees and fines, and mass incarceration, then it's important to understand what's going on here. Lubet's evident desire for self-promotion is an important factor, but his willingness, and exploitation of the willingness of others, to take the word of police over anyone else is equally important in the creation of the story, and much more important in its long-term effect on how we view unequal justice.
Lubet offers Goffman a choice: say yes, she wanted her friend's killer to die and have Lubet call for her to be prosecuted, or say it wasn't real and have him use that to cast doubt on her truthfulness more broadly. Gee, there's a good-faith invitation to serious, honest discussion. There's no room for nuance here, no acknowledgement that we're talking about a woman in her 20s who in a short timespan saw one person shot to death and then spent hours in a hospital with her dying and eventually dead friend. He's picking at minor details in a methodological appendix, in which Goffman took risks to produce an honest, rigorous account of the research process, and using them to try to undermine an entire book and its arguments about the destructive effects of intensive policing. Oh, and elevating himself in the process. When, before he set his sights on Alice Goffman, did Steven Lubet get this much public attention? He's given it a shot repeatedly in recent years—for instance, he attempted to insert himself in another recent academic controversy by writing an op-ed defending the University of Illinois' decision to withdraw a job offer to scholar Steven Salaita over his tweets about Israel-Palestine—but not with this kind of sustained success, and he's pushing it as far as it will take him.
So let's take a little look at Steven Lubet, shall we? Until 2001, his publications were largely in law reviews or were law texts. Then, in 2001, he began making a clear play for a general audience, starting with the book Nothing But the Truth: Why Trial Lawyers Don't, Can't, and Shouldn't Have to Tell the Whole Truth. (Seriously.) Of course, he's not arguing that lawyers should lie, but that:
... the lawyer's art—separating disparate statements into a single meaningful account—is not an unprincipled act of creating useful fiction. It is just the opposite. A conscientious attorney fashions a story not to hide or distort the truth, but rather to enable a client to come closer to the truth.
Following his own advice, Lubet wants to shape disparate small details of Goffman's work—many of them insignificant in the grand scheme of things—to create a "single meaningful account" in which her work is fraudulent and/or unethical (the and/or depends which of his pieces or indeed his paragraphs you read). In so doing, he aims to take away the meaningful account she offers of the lives of young black men living within or on the run from the confines of the criminal system, to make us discount their stories and the lessons we might learn from them.
Lubet's quest for a mass audience continued with a flurry of books (he has another forthcoming this year!) with titles a far cry from earlier works such as Arbitration Advocacy. Sadly, though, few of them seem to have gotten much of an audience, as evidenced by the fact that Amazon shows them available only in hardcover and Kindle, but no paperback releases, strongly suggesting they didn't exactly hit the level of sales a title like Lawyers' Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players is clearly trolling for. In that book, Lubet writes that:
The key strategy in poker is almost always to deceive the other players by misrepresenting your own cards—often by showing strength when your cards are weak (thus bluffing them into folding their hands) or by showing weakness when your cards are strong (thus encouraging them to keep betting when they cannot win).
Lubet's attacks on Goffman can be seen as an extended bluff—he hurls out accusation after accusation, leaving behind each one as it gets refuted or fails to get attention, but continuing to use his fishing expedition to drum up the appearance of scandal. He's employing a tactic he condemns in the same book, in which "insecurity" leads lawyers to "overload appellate briefs with numerous trivial arguments, rather than concentrate on a few good ones." Is there a lawyer version of "physician, heal thyself"?
Still, it's been effective as a tactic to turn the topic away from the environment of police brutality, surveillance, and sharply constrained life chances detailed in On the Run—and before and beyond it in an extensive literature, and reflected in the news constantly. Time and time again we've seen the harsh realities not just of physical police violence but of endless fines and court fees, the criminalization of poverty, and justice unequally applied. These are not phenomena that sprang from the mind of Alice Goffman or stories she was sold by her subjects—they're part of American life that too often go ignored or denied by white people. On the Run shows how all those things—things, again, that we know about and can quantify—shape people's lives, and somehow we end up talking about academic ethics in gaming journalism. Forgive me if I'm skeptical.
Alice Goffman included her participation—however ritualistic, however real—in seeking revenge out of what may have been an excess of honesty. She didn't have to write about it and if she hadn't, Lubet would have had to hang his attacks on her on less salacious material. Gamergate jokes aside, there may be an important discussion to be had about ethics in academic research, but this is not it. What Lubet claims to want from Goffman would have to come from a broad-based shift in how institutional review boards and lawsuit-shy universities oversee academic research, but that's not where he's going with this. Lubet attacks a single researcher for the crime of honesty. That is not the path to institutional change, it's the path to personal smugness.
It's also a distraction from the bigger issues: militarized policing, a racist justice system, poverty and inequality. Again and again, the people questioning the truth of Goffman's account turn to the police, who deny whatever is at issue, and the critics turn, triumphant, and say, "See! She's making it up or being sold a line by her subjects." But how often have we seen police minimize or explain away or seek to cover up police brutality? What the police say publicly about their own practices is hardly gospel, and the motives of anyone taking it as such are equally suspect. Why can't we give equal credence to, never mind Alice Goffman, but to Chuck's mother, Miss Linda, who told the New Republic that "The book is true"?