On April 5 at 12:15 p.m., Bernard Harcourt will speak at the University of Chicago Law School’s Fourth Annual Chicago’s Best Ideas series. Harcourt will lecture on "Language of the Gun: A Semiotic for Law & Social Science." The event is free and open to the public.
Harcourt is author of Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy. Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.
We will publish Harcourt’s new book, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, later this year. See our earlier post about the subject of that book.