The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy

Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas PrizeA Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book| Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles TimesA leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics.The figure of the American sheriff has loomed large in popular imagination, though given the outsize jurisdiction sheriffs have over people’s lives, the office of sheriffs remains a gravely under-examined institution. Locally elected, largely unaccountable, and difficult to remove, the country’s over three thousand sheriffs, mostly white men, wield immense power—making arrests, running county jails, enforcing evictions and immigration laws—with a quarter of all U.S. law enforcement officers reporting to them. In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert that their authority supersedes that of leg