Making Sense of the Messy Sixties: Introduction to a Review Symposium on Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation

This essay provides a summary and critical appraisal of Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, a book that interweaves the stories of an eclectic cast of characters who were the targets of vagrancy law prosecutions with stories of the lawyers who challenged these prosecutions. In charting the demise of what she terms a “vagrancy law regime,” Goluboff provides insights on the major social and political developments of the 1940s through the 1970s, including the labor movement, the black freedom struggle, the antiwar movement, and the sexual revolution. Goluboff's most significant achievement is her ability to identify in seemingly scattered challenges to vagrancy law a coherent and historically significant episode of constitutional change. Although I question whether the book delivers on its promise to reframe the way we understand the “long 1960s,” Vagrant Nation nonetheless offers a model of how to integrate social history and doctrinal history into a compelling narrative of constitutional change.