Does the law ever hinder the maintenance of public order?
CC: Yes, but let me begin with a caveat. I don’t believe that law hinders the maintenance of public order by requiring that police respect and protect the fundamental liberties of individual citizens. There are other ways, however, in which the law does hinder the maintenance of public order. One problem seems to be inherent in our legal- and judicial-processing system: it looks at individual cases apart from the broader context within which they take place. One individual incident of public drunkenness or street prostitution, for example, may not be terribly troublesome, but when you get an agglomeration of these kinds of behaviors — around a school where there are many kids, for instance — then you have a much more serious situation. Judges are asked to make decisions about the lawfulness and the impact of individual acts. This is problematic. Increasingly we’re advising cities and states to bring into court the argument that aggregated behavior is the real problem. One of the othe
