2025 Barrock Lecture: The Place(s) for Localism in Criminal Law and Enforcement
Please join us for the 2025 Barrock Lecture: The Place(s) for Localism in Criminal Law and Enforcement, delivered by Ron Wright, the Needham Yancey Gulley Professor of Criminal Law at Wake Forest University Law School.
- Thursday, November 13, 2025
- 5:00 to 6:00 p.m., immediately followed by a public reception
- Marquette University Law School, Ray and Kay Eckstein Hall, Lubar Center
The event is complimentary; however, registration is required HERE.
This lecture will survey topics, times, and places when localism influences criminal law and enforcement. Then it will evaluate the scene, noting the levels of government best positioned to shape the variations with an eye to delivering public safety and legitimacy.
Here’s the basic situation: Actors at different levels of government—national, state, and local—shape the criminal law. The result is a fragmented landscape, with some practices being the same everywhere and others showing great variety from place to place. Consider, for example, constitutional search warrant requirements, which apply uniformly to police working in very different urban and rural contexts, and, by contrast, the ability of local prosecutors to select charges that look completely different from the charges preferred by prosecutors in another district in similar cases. For many observers, fragmentation is troubling—a source of inconsistency, even hidden defiance of shared values. Others welcome the local variety as a source of creative experimentation and needed flexibility in a pluralistic society.
This lecture series remembers George Barrock, L’31, and Margaret Barrock.
Contact: Christine Wilczynski-Vogel, Associate Dean for External Relations