Criminal Law and "The Wire"

Susan A. Bandes, DePaul University College of Law, and Florida State University College of Law, has published And All the Pieces Matter: Thoughts on The Wire and the Criminal Justice System, in volume 8 of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (2011). Here is the abstract.

The standard police procedural, even including great dramas like NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues, adheres to time-honored narrative conventions. It focuses on good if sometimes imperfect cops trying to find the real bad guys - the perpetrators - and bring them to justice. A crime had ruptured the social fabric, and at the end of the episode, guilt is determined and things are put to right. The standard procedural is concerned mainly with individual fault and heroism. It does not raise disquieting questions about the criminal justice system, the legal system, or the social and political arrangements that lead to a permanent underclass. There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and in the police procedural, every one of them stands on its own.



The Wire is a different kind of television. It aims not to reassure but to unsettle, or as David Simon once put it, "to pick a fight." Unlike the standard police procedural, which resolves a discrete problem every week, The Wire keeps widening its lens to reveal the context in which crime and policing take place. Although the show begins as a description of an actual wiretap, the series soon turns out to be about a series of interlocking systems, wired for dysfunction.



The Wire is deeply concerned with institutions, how they constrain the shape of individual lives, and how they perpetuate themselves, often at the expense of achieving their legitimate goals. However, although the show’s most cherished subject is the institutional roadblocks to good policing, The Wire defies the standard paradigm in this regard as well. It is not one of those cop shows that reflexively portray constitutional rights as annoying hindrances to law enforcement. Other shows tell us that cops need free rein; that we ought to trust their instincts and keep the government and the Constitution off their backs. This show vividly demonstrates that those instincts are sometimes misguided or self protective and that the right kinds of limits can play an important role in good police work.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.


This essay is an exploration and appreciation of The Wire’s remarkable portrait of the criminal justice system, with particular attention to its insights about policing and criminal procedure. It uses the chess lesson scene from Season One, “The King Stay the King,” as a starting point.

National Security TV

Dawinder S. Sidhu, Hosh Law, has published "Wartime America and The Wire: A Response to Posner’s Post-9/11 Constitutional Framework." Here is the abstract.

Pragmatists subscribe to the view that an individual’s practical experiences shape and inform an individual’s concept of the law. In Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, one of the legal community’s most admired and prolific pragmatists, Judge Richard A. Posner, presents his thoughts on how courts should resolve questions of constitutional law that implicate national security and individual rights.

As the relationship between security and liberty remains largely undefined in the post-9/11 world, Posner offers an important and timely perspective on a critical area of constitutional law. His framework is one in which security interests invariably supercede liberty interests in times of crisis. As such, according to Posner, an executive possesses significant authority to respond to national security needs in wartime and despite established rights, the judiciary should commensurately play a limited checking role on relevant executive action, profiling and discrimination of Muslims may be condoned, torture can be used to elicit information from detainees, and an executive may invoke the “law of necessity” to step outside of the “law of the Constitution.”

This essay uses an element of practical reality -- specifically themes from the acclaimed television series on law enforcement and crime, The Wire -- to challenge each of these conclusions from Not a Suicide Pact. Drawing on those themes, it argues that security and liberty are not locked in a zero sum game, that the judiciary should robustly check executive action especially in these perilous times, that profiling and discrimination of Muslims in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing should be deemed impermissible, that torture is not only inconsistent with American legal obligations but also counterproductive to the war campaign, and finally that the executive is bound by and must not act beyond the Constitution, exigent circumstances and moral positions notwithstanding.

The essay thus suggests that the courts should give pause to the direction of constitutional law urged by Posner. Appealing to both law and practical reason, it admits that the law must be flexible in the post-9/11 era, but posits that the law and traditional constitutional norms still must guide and restrain the executive temptation to defend the nation at all costs.

Download the paper from SSRN here.