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

by Jessica Pishko (Author)

Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School's J. Anthony Lukas Prize

A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles Times

A 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 legislatures, courts, and even the president. They've protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the "Big Lie" of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing.

How did a group of law enforcement officers decide that they were "above the law?" What are the stakes for local and national politics, and for America as a multi-racial democracy?

Blending investigative reporting, historical research, and political analysis, author Jessica Pishko takes us to the roots of why sheriffs have become a flashpoint in the current politics of toxic masculinity, guns, white supremacy, and rural resentment, and uncovers how sheriffs have effectively evaded accountability since the nation's founding.

A must-read for fans of Michelle Alexander, Gilbert King, Elizabeth Hinton, and Kathleen Belew.

Author Biography

Jessica Pishko is a journalist and lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School and Columbia University's MFA program. Her writings about criminal justice have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Appeal, The New Republic, The Nation, Slate, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has been awarded journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and Type Investigations, and has provided policy guidance for criminal system reform nonprofits. After turning her attention to sheriffs in 2016, she served as a fellow in the Sheriff Accountability Project at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where she examined state laws related to sheriff elections and sheriff removal procedures. Her work was the first to put many of the issues related to sheriffs on the political map. Most recently, she was a 2022 New America Fellow.