Constitution Day Lecture: Punishing Poverty: The Constitutionality of Cash Bail, Sept. 20

The Center for Law, Justice & Culture will host a Constitution Day Lecture by Christine Scott-Hayward on "Punishing Poverty: The Constitutionality of Cash Bail" on Sept. 20 from 7-9 p.m. at the Athena Cinema.

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

"Despite recent reforms, cash bail remains the dominant form of pretrial release in the United States. This means that hundreds of thousands of people are locked up while they await trial (or until they plead guilty) simply because they cannot afford to pay the cash bail set for them. Scott-Hayward’s lecture examines the role of the Constitution in both perpetuating and addressing the inequalities in the criminal justice system caused by pretrial detention, and suggests that there are multiple paths to ensuring robust constitutional protection of pretrial liberty," Kevin Uhalde, associate professor of History and director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture in the College of Arts and Sciences, said.

Scott-Hayward is an associate professor and director of the School of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Emergency Management at California State University, Long Beach. Her research emphasizes the practical implications of criminal laws and policies and currently focuses on bail and sentencing. She is the author or co-author of numerous articles, published in both law reviews and social science journals, and a book, Punishing Poverty: How Bail and Pretrial Detention Fuel Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System (2019). Most recently she co-edited the American Society of Criminology’s Handbook on Pretrial Justice (2021).

Prior to joining the faculty at CSU Long Beach, she was a post-doctoral research scholar and lecturer at Columbia Law School, clerked for the Honorable James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York, and worked as a research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. In 2016-17, she served as a Supreme Court Fellow, assigned to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.