
Trevor G. Gardner
Treiman Professor of Law
Trevor Gardner’s research addresses various issues in crime governance with a primary focus on police. He has written extensively on the relationship between federalism and police administration and is developing a separate line of research regarding disparate African American perspectives on police-administered criminal procedure. Trevor’s scholarship has appeared or will appear in the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Boston University Law Review.
Trevor graduated from Harvard Law School in 2003 after serving as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal. He went on to work in the Trial Division of the District of Columbia Public Defender Service, litigating juvenile and adult cases from presentment through disposition. After leaving criminal practice for academia, Trevor obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley with a primary focus on social theory. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of Michigan Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, the UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, and the Washington University Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity.
- Education
- M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2013
- J.D., Harvard Law School, 2003
- B.A., University of Michigan, 1999
- Courses
- Criminal Law
- Criminal Procedure—Investigations
- Crime Policy Seminar
- Areas of Expertise
- Police
- Criminal Administration
- Immigrant Sanctuaries
- Racial Profiling
- Criminological Theory
- Sociology of Punishment
- Publications
Law Review Articles & Essays
- Rethinking Police Diversity, 114 J. Crim. L. & Criminology_(forthcoming 2024).
- The Reach of Legal Cynicism: A Comment on Tommie Shelby’s “The Idea of Abolition,” Crim. Law Philos. (forthcoming 2023).
- Racism[s], Social Theory, and Normative Criminal Law, Handbook on Race, Racism, and the Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming 2023).
- Rethinking Racial Equity in Criminal Procedure, 171 U. Pa. Rev. 1 (forthcoming 2023).
- Regulating Police Chokeholds (with Esam Al-Shareffi), 112 The J. Crim. L. & Criminology Online (2022).
- By Any Means: A Philosophical Frame for Rulemaking Reform in Criminal Law, 130 Yale L.J. Forum (2021).
- Law and Order as the Foundational Paradox of the Trump Presidency, 73 Stan. L. Rev. Online 141 (2021).
- Police Violence and the African American Procedural Habitus, 100 B. U. L. Rev. 849 (2020).
- Immigrant Sanctuary as the “Old Normal”: A Brief History of Police Federalism, 19 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (2019).
- Right at Home: Modeling Sub-Federal Resistance as Criminal Justice Reform, 46 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 527 (2019) (profiled in Jotwell: https://crim.jotwell.com/local-resistance-and-criminal-law-reform/).
- The Promise and Peril of the Anti-Commandeering Rule in the Homeland Security Era: Immigrant Sanctuary as an Illustrative Case, 34 St. Louis U. Pub. L. Rev. 313 (special issue on “The New Civil War”) (2015).
- The Political Delinquent: Crime, Deviance, and Resistance in Black America, 20 Harv. BlackLetter L.J. 141 (2004).
Other Writing
- What Would MLK Do?: A Civil Rights Model of “Good Citizenship” in Criminal Procedure, Jotwell (September 9, 2020) (https://crim.jotwell.com/?s=Bennett+capers).
- Crime Policy and Federalism in Federalism in America: An Encyclopedia (2018) (co-authored with Lisa L. Miller).
- Racial Profiling as Collective Definition, 2 Social Inclusion 52 (2014) (peer-reviewed).
- The CAP Effect: Racial Profiling in the ICE Criminal Alien Program, The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, Berkeley Law Center (2009) (with Aarti Kohli).
Works in Progress
- Rethinking Police Diversity
- Normative Criminal Federalism
- Crime and Human Capital (Book Manuscript)
- Download CV