Writing

In my current book project, Legitimating Violence: Interpretations, Court Rulings, and Racial Violence in America, I offer a new approach to examining how the American court system distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Court cases are sites of contestation for differing interpretations of acts committed.  In acts involving violence, the role of the court is to determine whether the violence committed is legitimate or illegitimate.  How does this interpretation take place?  What investigative tools do lawyers, juries, judges, and justices use to analyze acts of violence for their [il]legitimacy?  The U.S. has long been called a racial state, meaning that racial categories are foundational to the structure and function of the state apparatus.  Specific patterns of interpretation whose logics do not explicitly invoke race are mainstays of court procedure that frequently categorize violence against people of color as legitimate.  Using textual analysis of the oral arguments and written decisions of over 400 U.S. court cases between the years of 1964-present, I identify four common interpretive practices utilized by court actors during criminal proceedings to evaluate acts of violence.  Legitimating Violence offers a theory of how colorblind metrics of analysis in the contemporary U.S. court system produce legal outcomes that disproportionately legitimate violence against people of color.  

The public evaluation of police violence against people of color has become commonplace as phone cameras and live streaming to social media platforms have provided copious public video records of police use of force.  One result of this technological transformation is that the interpretation of such acts, once confined to discussion between individual witnesses and the opacity of court procedure, occurs publicly as millions of civilians analyze video clips, often captured by multiple sources with differing standpoints, and compare their own interpretations to those offered by media figures and court procedures.  In this book I contextualize police use of force within other legal categories of violence, historicize the progression of landmark decisions that undergird our current legal landscape, and offer a practical framework for analyzing how legal interpretations are produced.

I am also in the midst of data collection for a second book-length project and related articles, reflecting my broader intellectual interest in the relationship between power, violence, and legitimacy via a cultural pragmatist approach to the state.  In an article project currently titled “Coercion, Collusion, and the Racialized right to ‘security’ in the New Haven Black Panther Party Trials,” I examine the court testimonies in the 1969-1971 New Haven Black Panther Party trials, which led to the loss of widespread support throughout the Black community and marked the BPP with a reputation as an organization of cutthroat dissidents as corrupt and violent against Black boys and men as the FBI was itself.  How did this image come to be?  I propose an analysis of the legal and cultural frames of legitimacy applied to the violence performed by members of the BPP and the violence performed by the FBI. 

This article represents some of the early research for my second book project, in which I perform a historical comparison of the narrative representations both in media and in the criminal justice system of the deaths of Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, and Alex Rackley, teenage Black Panther Party member in the United States.  Both murders, which took place less than a decade apart, were highly publicized and functioned as tinderboxes for new waves of public outrage about race conflict in South Africa and the United States.  However, the dramatic differences in how popular narratives framed the deaths of these two young men are a useful site for unpacking distinctions in how the racial states of South Africa and the United States construct and maintain claims of legitimacy. 

Abigail Cary Moore. 2022. “Signs and Their Temporality: The Performative Power of Interpretation in the Supreme Court.” Sociological Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221110240

2022-2023 Bierstedt Award for Best Graduate Student Paper

Abigail Cary Moore. 2022. “Policing Potential Violence,” New Political Science 44(1):122-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2022.2028118

Isaac Ariail Reed, Abigail Cary Moore, Vasfiye Betul Toprak. 2021. “Hermeneutics and Performance in Social Theories of Power,” Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4

Abigail Cary Moore and Isaac Ariail Reed, 2019. “Violence and its Interpretations: Towards a Semiotic Theory of State Power.” Journal of Political Power 12 (2): 177-199.    https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2019.1618487

Isaac Ariail Reed and Abigail Cary Moore, “Rationality/Rationalization” in The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316771303