UC Irvine

This dissertation establishes a theoretical account of legal reasonableness in the United States as it relates to several varieties of “use of force” or intrusive actions by the State. It analyzes this logical current through contemporary use of force jurisprudence, the utilization of prisoners as objects of knowledge through experimentation, and the carceral sphere as a site of ecological injustice. In doing so, I chart the inconsistent evolution of the legal notion of “reasonableness” which is enabled by, among other things, legally endogenous mechanisms such as qualified immunity. These institutional augmentations tend to enable excessive force by state actors even as they claim to impose limits or lay out the very terms through which the legal concept of “excess” is (re)-articulated over time. Taking some queues theoretically from Martinot and Sexton (2003), who engage the ways the discursive response of the State simultaneously enables and disavows police violence, as well as from Han (2015), who uses the term “decompositional right” to describe a process in which a newly granted legal right begins to wither upon its formation and continues to do so through its elaboration, I examine the ways in which the legal discourse of reasonableness sets the stage for an “objectivity” established in accordance with the parameters favored by the State actors the law ostensibly regulates. Taking a theoretical approach to the formation of this logical circularity could uncover some of the ways in which these different contemporary issues are homologous, converging on a legal notion of reasonableness that functions to perpetually deflect from or rationalize various forms of state violence.