Getting my driver's license marked a significant change in my life. No longer was I dependent on my long-suffering mother to play chauffeuse (although, with two younger children in the house, she would be wearing a metaphorical scally cap for years to come). With a driver's license and an old car inherited from a great-uncle, I was able to escape my teenage ennui, or at least to relocate it to the parks and beaches of South Florida, where my friends and I could indulge in that blend of lassitude and restlessness unique to the teenage experience without exasperating interruptions by parents or siblings. Driving my first car, beat-up hand-me-down that it was, gave me an unprecedented degree of control over my life.
Driving also put me in the position where the state had an unprecedented degree of control over my life. I was stopped for speeding, for equipment violations, and, several times, for being suspicious. On one occasion, a friend and I had gone to a very ritzy part of Palm Beach to gawk at the mansions; we were stopped while sitting in front of a church on a sidewalk bench, next to the sunbaked, older model car that gave powerful, if mute, evidence to our outsider status. My early interactions with the police were not, I think, particularly unusual. Indeed, this is exactly the point; my newfound freedoms were accompanied by a new level of scrutiny from the police, but one that seems entirely normal.
In Policing the Open Road, University of Iowa law professor Sarah A. Seo brilliantly captures this tension. Engagingly written and meticulously researched, the book puts automobiles at the center of the cultural evolution of a society that has embraced “policing as a mode of governance and updated its laws to sanction police discretion” (267). In this vein, Prof. Seo's work joins that of others who have highlighted the historical roles of world-shaping phenomena that are so omnipresent that they may otherwise go overlooked, including Reference DiamondJared Diamond's (1999) Guns, Germs, and Steel, Reference PollanMichael Pollan's (2001) The Botany of Desire, Reference StandageTom Standage's (2009) A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Reference WilsonBee Wilson's (2020) Swindled, and many other valuable contributions.
Policing the Open Road has an automotive focus, and its thesis, convincingly argued throughout, is aptly summarized by its subtitle: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. Prof. Seo convincingly argues that despite the mythos, all but enshrined in American folklore, that the automobile is a symbol of “individual solitude and freedom” (10), the reality is that, from their early days, automobiles dramatically expanded the scope and contours of state control. That thesis plays out in six chapters, organized more topically than chronologically. In each chapter, Prof. Seo chronicles the manifold ways that the automobile playing a role in shaping the development of American society.
Prof. Seo's writing is delightful; she capably weaves individual and personal stories, rich historical details, and the highly textured cultural context against which Supreme Court cases were decided into a unified, compelling narrative, reminiscent of Reference AlexanderMichelle Alexander's (2010) groundbreaking The New Jim Crow. Like Prof. Alexander's opus, Policing the Open Road is one of a rare breed of books that advances legal scholarship while also contributing to public conversations; it is eminently accessible to a general audience and could easily be worked into an undergraduate or graduate curriculum. Even more impressively, Prof. Seo's writing remains accessible despite the sheer number of threads in the tapestry she presents. That Prof. Seo is able to so deftly turn the disparate threads of traffic safety, Prohibition, police professionalization, over-criminalization, public perceptions of police legitimacy, the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule, police discretion, and many other themes and topics into an intertwined whole is the hallmark of a remarkable author.
As I read Policing the Open Road, I was repeatedly drawn to contemplate my own experiences as a driver and, later, as an officer. When I did so, Prof. Seo's work inevitably led me to think differently about long-past interactions that, I admit, I had largely taken for granted. And it led me to think about the interactions that my children, including one preparing to get a driver's license, will have. If Prof. Seo's goal was to enable readers to view the world around them through a thought-provoking historical lens, Policing the Open Road is an unbridled success.
But the book also helped me think about the future. As Prof. Seo writes, “The contradiction of the automobile as both the preeminent symbol of American values and an object of extensive policing threw into sharp relief the vexing conundrum of discretionary policing in a society based on the rule of law” (159). Since Prof. Seo's book was released, that conundrum has become, if anything, even more vexing. When I finished Policing the Open Road, I was left contemplating the role the automobile will play in the next evolution of American society, the changes that will occur against the backdrop of board public skepticism of policing as a mode of governance and the increasingly availability of ever-more sophisticated autonomous vehicles.
Policing the Open Road does not attempt to answer those questions, but it gives readers a firm historical foundation for thinking about the answers.
