Meet the sheriffs who believe they are ‘The Highest Law in the Land’

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the a b Journal’s Lee Rawles. And today I’m joined by Jessica Pishko, author of the book, the Highest Law in the Land, how The Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. Jessica, thanks so much for joining us.

Jessica Pishko:

It’s great to be here.

Lee Rawles:

So as you mentioned in the book, I think the first thing that people think of when they think of sheriffs, there’s kind of a motley collection. You could think of the sheriff of Nottingham from Robinhood. You could think of all the Western movies you may have seen as a child, but let’s ground people, sheriffs are part of law enforcement, but what is the history behind sheriffs? What’s the Sheriff 1 0 1

Jessica Pishko:

Sheriffs are basically a part of the policing and law enforcement universe in the United States. And to put it in some perspective, there’s around 18,000 individual law enforcement agencies in the United States. So there are just over 3000 elected sheriffs. So there’s one per county. They’re elected on the county level, which is different from most law enforcement officers. They’re more like district attorneys elected on the county level. And every state has sheriffs, mostly elected sheriffs with a few exceptions. The states that don’t have sheriffs are Alaska, Hawaii, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. And this is largely because they don’t have counties. There are a handful of appointed sheriffs in the country, and that often has to do with some complicated county rules. So if you live in a place like New York City, for example, where there’s a sheriff who is appointed, that’s why it’s just a slightly different form of a county.

And across the country, these sheriffs have a pretty wide range of responsibilities. So speaking most generally in most states, sheriffs are allowed to do wide types of policing. So that would include things like traffic stops, executing warrants, investigating crimes, responding to calls for service. So that’s the first bucket of things sheriffs do. The second bucket of things most sheriffs do is run county jails. About 85% of county jails are run by sheriffs. So there are a handful of exceptions. There are a few county jails that are not run by sheriffs, but the vast majority of them are. And in those places, county sheriffs are responsible for everything that happens inside the jail. So that includes what sorts of medical cares provided, who the contractors are, how they book people, whether they’re solitary confinement, and also whether or not that particular sheriff cooperates with immigration and to what extent.

So that’s something we might get to later. And then there’s the third bucket of things sheriffs do, which is sort of an interesting array of civil and criminal duties. This would include things like handgun permits. They often remove people from their homes if that’s necessary. They also execute quite a number of warrants, and they also do a lot of things like for example, if you have a protective order from someone, that’s often something that the sheriff will do. And in most places, if for example, you file a what’s called a red flag law, so a law that removes firearms from someone who might be dangerous, that’s usually the sheriff who does that as well.

Lee Rawles:

So one thing I thought about a lot while reading the book was the rural urban divide. So according to the 2020 census, about 97% of the landmass of the United States is rural, but only about 20% of Americans live in an area that is considered rural. If you’re listening to me, odds are 80% of you at least live in suburbs or city. You may be much more used to coming into contact with city police. But I think both of us or I know I grew up in a very rural area, there were 400 people who technically lived in the quote town, and the county sheriff was the only law enforcement officer that was around when I first was a child. I don’t think we had 9 1 1 service. It was not a place with a lot of contact necessarily with the sheriff. Can you talk a little bit about how rural versus urban sheriffs could differ because the Cook County Sheriff, for example, covers the city of Chicago and the suburbs, so literal millions of people versus the county. I grew up in T County, Illinois, which I think at the last census count had maybe 16,000 people total.

Jessica Pishko:

So that’s exactly right. One of the interesting things about sheriffs is that because they are elected on the county level, they might represent, as you say, I think in Texas there’s a county with 250 people in it, or they might represent millions of people if they are, for example, as you say, the Cook County Sheriff or the Harris County Sheriff in Houston, Texas or the Los Angeles County Sheriff. Those are sheriffs with much larger departments and they oversee many more people. And yet regardless of the size of the county, each county gets one sheriff. Now one thing I point out is that what that creates is a little bit of a mismatch, kind of like the electoral college. So for example, if you have a group of sheriffs, let’s say in Illinois who oppose a particular firearm regulation, let’s say 80 sheriffs say they oppose it, those 80 sheriffs out of maybe 90 something usually represent far from even half the population of the state.

So you might have a situation in which it looks like a lot of sheriffs, but those sheriffs are not representing the majority of the population. And so this is generally true, as you rightly point out in most places in the country. And again, as you say, because about 20% of people in the United States live in more rural areas, that means that sheriffs, a lot of sheriffs may be around 80% of sheriffs are representing about 20% of the population in urban areas. Sheriffs actually often have many of the same duties, but what happens is their office is highly professionalized. So you point into the Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who of course has a much larger office, and what he spends quite a lot more time doing is running his county jail. And this is also true in Los Angeles, and it’s true in a place like Houston, Texas.

I grew up in Dallas, Texas, so that’s similarly true. So it’s less likely you see the sheriff doing day-to-day policing or traffic stops, although you might on the highway. And there are also a number of sheriffs who have what they call contract cities. This is true in Los Angeles because it’s a very, very large county. They have smaller cities that can’t afford to put up their own police department, so they pay the sheriff’s office for policing. So this is something that might happen sometimes oftentimes in smaller suburban communities or ex-urban spaces, they might contract with the county sheriff. So they basically pay the county sheriff a fee to be their police in lieu of setting up their own police department. And so while what the sheriff does might look a little different, and it’s generally true that these big city sheriffs as opposed to most of the sheriffs in the country might lean a little more Democrat. That’s where you’ll get Democrat sheriffs. It also means that the vast majority of sheriffs in the country lean very conservative. And so sometimes I also point people to this statistic, which is about 80% of counties in the United States voted for Trump in 2020. So that means about 80% of sheriffs are the sheriff of a county in which most of their constituents voted for Trump. And that can kind of serve as a useful proxy for how the political leanings of sheriffs might differ from the majority of the population in the country.

Lee Rawles:

We’re definitely going to get to more discussion about elections, but first we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Jessica Pishko, author of The Highest Law in the Land, how the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. And I promised we were going to talk a little bit about elections. So first off, how would sheriffs generally be involved in the electoral systems, say in some of these rural counties, and how did this play out during the last presidential election or the upcoming presidential election? And just for my listeners, you and I are speaking on October 18th, so we don’t know about anything else that has happened after October 18th.

Jessica Pishko:

That’s right.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah. So elections,

Jessica Pishko:

So in general, to be perfectly honest, sheriffs just do not have a role in elections. And some people might think back to something like the civil rights era in the 1960s in which there were a large number of sheriffs, particularly southern sheriffs who were involved in elections. And so what I’ll say is that historically, oftentimes sheriffs were the people who either carried ballots, right? They would be in charge of transportation of ballots, and sometimes they were in charge of things like voter registration, particularly in the south. So if you are thinking back to this time period, and many people think of it because southern sheriffs at the time were responsible for a lot of violence and disenfranchisement of black voters. That is why now those laws have changed largely because of those practices. Most states have laws that generally prevent law enforcement from being involved in any election activity.

The only time law enforcement, including sheriffs should be involved in elections is if someone is committing a crime. So let’s say if somebody assaults a poll worker, you would call your local law enforcement to arrest that individual. That said, the thing about county sheriffs is that because they’re elected and extremely political, they have gotten involved in electoral processes both as sort of campaign surrogates. So one of the things some listeners might have seen is a large number of sheriffs campaigning both for Donald Trump and a handful for Kamala Harris. The unique thing about sheriffs is because they are elected, they’re permitted to have political opinions. So the official decision is that they have in essence, a free speech right to political speech. And that is why you will see them campaigning and endorsing candidates, which is something that police chiefs are not allowed to do, beat cops are not allowed to do, and that’s because they’re appointed officials, they’re administrative officials who can’t express a political opinion.

Now of course, there’s problems with that which one can quickly start to imagine the problems in places where maybe the sheriff doesn’t agree with your political opinion, for example. But one of the things that did start to happen, because this thing about getting in elections has become a really politically polarizing topic, is that a lot of sheriffs, and as I pointed out, many of these sheriffs skew rather conservative, many of them do support Donald Trump, that they have picked up the idea that there’s a concerning effort, there are deep concerns about voter fraud, that they’re worried about non-citizen voting, and that they have tried to insert themselves in elections. What I will say is that in the past when they have done this, they did this in 2020 and 2022, that a lot of it was kind of smoke but no fire. We had sheriffs pretend to investigate various alleged voting fraud. So that’s on the positive side. A lot of this did not hold up. I will say there is at least one sheriff in Michigan who is still investigating voter fraud in 2020. He has one deputy assigned to it full time, and this is causing a lot of problems in his local community because they quite frankly don’t have that many deputies. And so dedicating one whole resource to voting fraud strikes many people is very wasteful.

Lee Rawles:

What we haven’t gotten to yet, and is a major part of the book Driving force behind the book is the idea of the constitutional sheriff movement, the constitutional sheriff movement. When I heard about it prior to reading, your book struck me very much as the sovereign citizen movement does on its face. I don’t see it as I was like, what? Well, how could someone believe this? But many people do, and it is a serious movement. So can we talk about the constitutional sheriff movement? What do they believe about how much of the population of sheriffs seems to endorse these beliefs, et cetera? Let’s get into it. The Constitutional Sheriff movement,

Jessica Pishko:

In short, the constitutional sheriff movement is a far right movement of sheriffs who believe that they are the only law enforcement official capable of interpreting laws such that they’re constitutional. So I want to be clear, that’s where the constitutional part comes in. They believe they can decide which laws are constitutional or unconstitutional. It doesn’t have anything to do with sheriffs in the US Constitution. It’s intentionally a little bit confusing, right? Because most people in the United States think that the Constitution is a good thing. And so it brings up positive associations, which is why I sometimes call it the far right sheriff movement. And to that extent, the thing to remember is that these constitutional sheriffs are focused on the first 10 amendments. So that includes things like religious speech, ownership of private property, the ability to protect your property and money from the federal government and the Second Amendment, as well as a big emphasis on state’s rights.

So that’s the first 10 amendments. They do not mean things like the 14th Amendment, the due process clause, racially equality. They don’t mean the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote, and they also don’t mean the amendments which created the federal income tax, which is actually where they also start to intersect with the sovereign citizen movement. So there is an intersection and a historical roots that are very similar. The big difference I think, is that the constitutional sheriff movement has become more popular. One because it has an element of truth, which is that sheriffs are elected officials and do exercise a lot of independent power. And also two constitutional sheriffs paint themselves as sort of a moderating force in the face of things like militia groups or other kind of patriot style groups like Proud Boys or Three Percenters. They’re aware that many people are not aligned or don’t agree with the more violent tactics of malicious style groups.

And so they present themselves as sort of a more moderate alternative to say, well, we’re going to make sure that for example, the federal government doesn’t enforce firearm laws or a TF regulations, and that way the people in the county’s constitutional rights are protected. And also it will sort of keep the peace. One of the things the constitutional sheriffs will say is that they’re serving as a peacekeeping movement. And that said, also the constitutional sheriff movement has a lot of ideas that are very much aligned with the far right, includes things like intense xenophobia. So they’re very opposed to immigration, and they do support immigration enforcement, even though that’s a federal law situation, they do not support a firearm regulation. So no gun laws. They also are very opposed to the rights of L-G-B-T-Q people. So they’re very opposed to things like gay marriage is something that they strongly oppose.

And so what I think you see is that while these sheriffs present the idea of enforcing the constitutionality of laws as neutral, what they’re really doing is enforcing a set of far right norms. And these are norms that are opposed to Black Lives Matter. They are opposed to student protestors, they’re opposed to abortion rights, they’re opposed to immigration. So they basically are just, I think, acting as a political arm, which is something I talk about in the book that the idea they’re enforcing the Constitution neutrally is just a fantasy, and in reality they’re just imposing a set of political ideas that they think are correct.

Lee Rawles:

Well, let’s get into the research portion of this book and how you learned about the constitutional sheriff movement. How did you find out what constitutional sheriffs are talking about with each other or in their communities? What was your research process?

Jessica Pishko:

So one of the things I noticed was that in 2020 when Covid came, and a lot of states and localities imposed various health measures, so businesses closed, schools closed mask mandates were put in place. I noticed that there was a lot of activity among constitutional sheriffs. So two things started happening. One was that they began to hold training sessions. So the main group that does this is called the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officer Association, which is run by an ex Arizona sheriff named Richard Mack. And his basic strategy is that he goes around the country to mostly rural and suburban areas, and he holds what he calls training sessions for sheriffs. And in a few states, Texas was one of them. They were available for credit. You could get your law enforcement continuing education credit. And the thing about these training sessions, which they sort of purported to be teaching sheriffs about the constitution, but if you went, what you saw was that they were teaching sheriffs about their version of the constitution.

So Richard Mack would go and would talk about the fact that sheriffs should not enforce asset seizure. He talked about how sheriffs should help protect private property. This is a very big thing, especially in rural areas and the west, because the federal government owns a lot of land in the West. So the notion of private property is a big deal for a lot of sheriffs. And also that sheriffs should not enforce any gun regulations, which might include things like illegal firearms or illegal firearm parts, or for example, the use of red flag laws, which is something constitutional sheriff strongly opposed. So he was essentially just talking about his ideas, which also included things like federal income tax was illegal and other sorts of things. It’s also very anti IRS and anti FBI ideology. Now, of course, you might ask, oh, well, how are they allowed to do that?

And the reason is because most states very loosely regulate their training. And so once Texas, for example, started to realize that this was not a legitimate training, they ended it. But in the meantime, he had already gone out and trained over a hundred sheriffs. The second thing he does is a bit more kind of a bit like a traveling snake oil salesman is what I call it. He would go around the country and have in essence rallies. And this was really popular during Covid times all throughout 2021 as well. Many of these groups would have these sort of rallies that were anti mask rallies that were pro kind of militia rallies. And Richard Mack would go along with these. And before Stuart Rhodes was in prison, he also used to go on the road with Stuart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers a lot. So they would often go as kind of a group to various places. And what was a big deal was they would go to a rural place and set up basically a big outdoor rally. So I went to some and they would have food and children and games, and then they would have a rally and people talking about how they opposed the federal government, how the election was stolen,

Lee Rawles:

And these kind of events in rural areas are not unprecedented. What it sounded like to me was a tent revival or what they used to call medicine shows.

Jessica Pishko:

Yes, it’s exactly like a medicine show. And as you understand, it’s a big deal, right? Because rural areas, people don’t come to rural areas to do things. So when Richard Matt comes to town and has a huge rally on a Saturday morning, it’s a really big deal, and people come and bring their guns and militias come and they fly their pro-Trump flags. And so I went to a number of these rallies largely because I was really interested in what people found appealing about it, why were people attracted. And I think a part of it honestly was that these were people who felt like their officials were far away, and a lot of them were far away. I mean, I went to Battle Mountain Nevada and Battle Mountain Nevada is far away from Reno and Las Vegas. It is. It’s very far. It’s very far from dc. And the people there kind of feel like, well, nobody in state or federal government cares about us. But Richard Mack will come and bring a little traveling circus with him and talk to people that

Lee Rawles:

Well. And the message that many sheriffs have when running for election, et cetera, is I am local. I know you can count on me to defend you against the people you don’t know.

Jessica Pishko:

That’s exactly right. And that’s why sheriffs are attractive to a lot of these people is they’re both a law enforcement officer, which gives them a kind of credibility in the neighborhood. The sheriff obviously represents a form of law and order, but also that they’re protecting people from what they see as outside forces. And people will also remember that the summer of 2020 was filled with a lot of protests against police brutality. And so in many rural areas, the idea that Black Lives Matter protesters or Antifa would come to town and stage some sort of protest or walk was a really big anxiety for people. And so they also saw sheriffs as protecting them from that, right? I mean basically protecting them from liberal protesters who might come to town and cause some sort of problem in their community.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take a quick break to hear from her advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Jessica Pishko, author of The Highest Law in The Land. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. Shifting gears just a little bit, because I know I have many lawyers, legal professionals listening to this interview, how has this constitutional sheriff movement in which they say we are the interpreters of the Constitution? And literally, I read a quote in your book from one of these people who says, the Supreme Court can’t tell us what to do.

Jessica Pishko:

That’s exactly right.

Lee Rawles:

How has the legal community experienced interacting with constitutional sheriffs? Has there been friction? What are people encountering who are legal professionals when it comes to these movements and these beliefs and ideologies?

Jessica Pishko:

One of the reasons why I wrote the book as a lawyer who has done work on criminal legal system reform was that I felt like the legal response to sheriffs, particularly the constitutional sheriff ideology, was not as strong as it could be. So to first put it very honestly, the idea that sheriffs are in some way above the President or the Supreme Court is just not legally true. There’s no legal precedent and the use of this ideology and where they derive their legal precedents are from what segregationists in the South said, right? That’s where it comes from. That’s what segregationists in the South argue that the Supreme Court couldn’t force them to desegregate schools. It’s exactly the same ideology, and they use the same words. So we know that that’s not legal, that’s not how the law works. That said, I do think we’re kind of experiencing a sort of unprecedented time in which both the Supreme Court is shifting a lot.

The Supreme Court has changed a lot of legal precedent, and we see the legal landscape changing. And so I think that my thought or call to lawyers is not to be afraid to say that this is not how the law works in local communities. What often happens is when sheriffs say, well, I’m not going to enforce this law, it’s very difficult for people to respond in the community. First of all, sheriffs are elected, and so they are entitled to some amount of discretion and political viewpoint. Now that said, they are not Above the Law. Lots of local officials are elected, local judges are elected, district attorneys are elected, and they all have to follow laws, right? This is a concept really familiar to lawyers and legal professionals. Everybody has to follow laws and sheriffs have to follow laws. There are lots of laws that regulate sheriffs in states, all kinds of laws regulating their pensions and their pay and how jails are supposed to operate. So it’s kind of ridiculous to say that they don’t follow laws or are not governed by state or federal laws. And what I would like to see, honestly, is more legal engagement with the issue. There just haven’t been judges and haven’t been lawyers who have really tackled the issue of how are sheriffs perhaps different from local police, and how does their political influence impact the ways in which they are sort of allowed to just not follow the law and not really suffer consequences for it.

Lee Rawles:

The other thing that is true is that in many areas, there aren’t clear methods of discipline or removal for sheriffs. There was a recent case in Whitesburg Kentucky. There was a shooting in the Letcher County Courthouse. Judge Kevin Mullins was tragically killed, and the person who has been accused of doing this is the sheriff Sheriff Sean Stein and the governor of Kentucky asked for the sheriff to resign because it was not clear. He said, I do have other methods, but there’s not a clear cut disciplinary system here in Kentucky. And the sheriff did resign so that a new sheriff could be appointed or elected, but it struck me. Oh, so there’s not a very clear cut process for removal in some places?

Jessica Pishko:

So that’s right. I mean, when I looked into it, there’s a few different issues with it. One of them is that while states have removal processes in the first instance, they don’t get used very much. So a lot of them just are P procedures that have either never been used or the last time they were used was a hundred years ago. And so what that creates is a situation where governors and other local officials just aren’t clear on what they’re supposed to do. They don’t have a really clear template of how those procedure operates. So you can understand if you haven’t removed a sheriff since the 1920s that it’s sort of confusing how you’re supposed to do that today. And the other thing is that a lot of these methods are sort of complicated. They’re rather specific. Again, I will say lots of these were written over a hundred years ago.

So they just sort of don’t apply to the kind of situations that most people are facing in the current era. I mean, that said, I do think that states, there are some states who are working to pass laws to change things. So for example, Washington State has started to pass a number of laws. One of the things they’re trying to do is pass a law that we require background checks for sheriff candidates. So this would just be a basic background check like everybody else has to do to check and see did they work where they said the goal is to look for people who might’ve been fired from various departments or who’ve lied about their certifications or who have associations with groups like the oath keepers that maybe either they should not be in law enforcement, or at least at the minimum voters should know.

And those are laws that are immensely opposed by sheriffs. So the other thing about sheriffs, and if people are familiar with police unions, this is not really a surprise, is that sheriffs have their own state and also national organizations that lobby government officials. And one of the things they lobby is to not pass laws that would in any way limit who is sheriff or limit sheriff powers. And of course, many legislatures just listen to them because they figure, well, the sheriff knows what the laws about sheriffs are. I don’t know. I’m not an expert. And so when the sheriff says, well, you can’t make me follow that law, that’s not the same. I’m a constitutional office. A lot of legislators just capitulate. And often because again, one sheriffs have the patina of law enforcement authority, and two, often people just aren’t sure. And three, I think we’ve seen in some places like Los Angeles, the sheriff is not always above persecuting their political opponents, which is something that Alex Villanueva used to do. He sent investigators after his critics and had a special unit set up. So it’s not unheard of for a sheriff to also investigate their political enemies.

Lee Rawles:

Well, the highest law on the Land is a long and thorough book, and it’s got so much in it. I would love to get to everything. I’m going to recommend to readers that they definitely read your chapter about immigration enforcement and particularly find out about the 2 87 G program. Found it fascinating, but you’ll have to pick up the book to do that. Before we go, I don’t think we can end our conversation without talking about the role sheriffs play in incarceration. You’ve brought it up before. They’re responsible for county jails. When we think about who sheriffs are imprisoning, what kind of supervision prisoners receive, and then the economic benefits for sheriffs of serving this role in imprisonment, we got to talk about it. So could you give some points for listeners to help them understand what this role is sort of nationally that sheriffs have in American incarceration?

Jessica Pishko:

What most people will understand is that I think it’s pretty well known now that county jails as a whole are poorly regulated and also have one of the fastest growing incarcerated population. And just to frame it real quick, county jails usually hold people either who are awaiting trial. They sometimes hold people who are awaiting deportation proceedings, and they hold a lot of people who are serving shorter sentences. So often under a year is the general estimation. And so when we look at that population of people, again, this is very different from a state prison population, and yet these county jails remain grossly unregulated. People die in them rather often. And we don’t even have a federal system that tracks how often people are dying from either a lack of medical care or overdoses or mental health crisises. And again, sheriffs also use these jails to their profit, as you point out, they can hold people for the federal government, for the US marshals and for ice and receive in essence a per diem for holding these individuals.

And finally, I would say that because county jails are under the purview of the elected sheriff, what does tend to happen is that the sheriff gets to make decisions about how people in those jails are treated. And I think some people might be familiar with a series of New York Times articles about Mississippi Sheriffs, and these were sheriffs who grossly abused their power in jails and in policing. So they were in essence going after black community members inside their jails. They were harassing and sexually assaulting females who were being held inside the jail. And these are people who really don’t have a lot of recourse. If the sheriff runs your jail and you’re in a rural place, it’s very, very hard for people to file a lawsuit or make complaints about the county sheriff, particularly because these are people who are incarcerated many times, they are accused of committing crimes, and their goal is to get out of the criminal legal system. It makes it very hard for them to bring these claims, and I think it’s something that people really need to pay attention to, particularly as prisons are undergoing a great deal of reform. I think states have put a lot of energy alongside advocates to change prison conditions, but jails really remain just a place where there is plainly not enough oversight of what these sheriffs are doing.

Lee Rawles:

And there is sometimes political incentive for these sheriffs to use the treatment of the prisoners in their jails as campaign messaging. I mean, I’m remembering Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, bragging in the media, maybe political ads. I never lived in Arizona, so I don’t know about, oh, well, I put my prisoners in pink. Things of that nature.

Jessica Pishko:

They do. There’s a Florida sheriff right now who puts the people in his jail in black and white striped outfits and forces them to do roadside maintenance, calling them a chain gang. And these are things that I honestly think sheriffs do just to say, this is what I can do. To be clear, using the labor of people incarcerated in the jail for the personal benefit of sheriffs is also really common. So it is not unheard of for sheriffs to use people in their jail to campaign hand out flyers, mow lawns of the sheriff or the sheriff’s supporters fix roofs for individuals. So I mean, this is something that is again, sort of what I think most people would consider this gross abuse of power that just confers a lot of authority to the sheriff, that it doesn’t seem clear that they ought to have, and this is in closing, what I’ll say is this, I think sort of pokes at the lie of the constitutional sheriff movement. Constitutional sheriffs say, oh, well, I do this to protect my community. But when you look at sheriffs in their jails, in particular constitutional aligned sheriffs in their jails, what you instead see is mismanagement. You see fraud, you see graft. And to me that’s saying, well, they’re not protecting the people who are under their care. I mean, legally people in jail are the sheriff’s responsibility. And so you would think that if they were caring about their community, that those would be the people that they would spend the most time caring for.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Jessica, thanks so much for coming on to talk to us about the highest law in the land. If any of my listeners were interested in finding out more about you and your work or the book, do you have a website or any events coming up we can tell them about? So

Jessica Pishko:

I have a substack that’s sheriffs.substack.com. So pretty easy to find. And that’s usually where I post most of my events. I am going to a few law schools in the next month, Georgetown, Tulane, and Vanderbilt. If I remember correctly. I will post my events there, and I’m on most social media at J-E-S-S-P-I-S-H. So Jess Pich is my social media handle on all relevant social media, so you can also find me there.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you to Jessica for coming on this episode, and thank you to you, my listeners, for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you have a book that you’d like me to feature in an upcoming episode, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate review and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service.