Presumed Guilty

Erwin Chemerinsky
Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights
(W.W. Norton, August 2021)

Los Angeles Times Nonfiction Bestseller
On Library Journal‘s list of “Books and Authors to Know: Titles to Watch 2021”
Featured on The New York Times list of “Eight New Books We Recommend This Week”
Featured on Variety‘s list of “The Best New Political Audiobooks.”

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

Presumed Guilty, like the best-selling The Color of Law, is a “smoking gun” of civil rights research, a troubling history that reveals how the Supreme Court enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses. The fact that police are nine times more likely to kill Black men than other Americans is no accident; it is the result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and courts to presume that suspects are guilty before being charged.

Demonstrating how the prodefendant Warren Court was a brief historical aberration, Erwin Chemerinsky shows how this more liberal era ended with Nixon’s presidency and the ascendance of conservative justices, whose rulings―like Terry v. Ohio and Los Angeles v. Lyons―have permitted stops and frisks, limited suits to reform police departments, and even abetted the use of chokeholds. Presumed Guilty concludes that an approach to policing that continues to exalt “Dirty Harry” can be transformed only by a robust court system committed to civil rights.

Praise for Presumed Guilty

“In this revelatory and sobering book, Erwin Chemerinsky, America’s leading constitutional scholar, brilliantly exposes how the Supreme Court has allowed abusive police practices to flourish for decades. Consistently siding with the police, the Supreme Court has gutted some of our most important constitutional protections and left victims – disproportionately people of color – with no remedy for excessive police violence and illegal searches. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in defunding or reforming the police.”
–Adam Winkler, author of We the Corporations

“Chemerinsky lays out his argument clearly, carefully and passionately in Presumed Guilty. The book is accessible enough to hold the attention of readers without law degrees, powered by the author’s justifiable sense of righteous indignation. In case after case, Black men are unlawfully incarcerated, killed and executed, and the police and prosecutors are almost never held responsible, criminally or civilly.”
–Berkelyside

Reviewed in The New York Times
Reviewed in Berkeleyside

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. The author of The Conservative Assault on the Constitution and The Case Against the Supreme Court, among many other works, he lives in Berkeley.