The slaying of an unarmed man by police officers in Oakland, Calif. in 2009, a 1921 Supreme Court ruling involving the construction of a country house in New York and controversy over the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with "Stop Snitching'" in Baltimore six years ago.

On the surface, these matters have little in common.

But three professors contend that the legal debates underlying each case can either obscure or highlight basic human values like loyalty, equality or compassion.

The professors, Bret Asbury, Chapin Cimino and Donald Tibbs ventured to Providence, R.I. to appear at the 13th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities at Brown University in March.


Asbury, whose scholarly interests include law and literature, focused on the debate surrounding the anti-snitching culture that has occurred in Baltimore and other urban communities.

Rap artists ignited a firestorm in 2004 by releasing videos and selling T-shirts with a "Stop Snitching" message aimed at discouraging witnesses from testifying at criminal trials and silencing citizens who might be tempted to help police combat the drug trade.

"The attention it received cast it as something of an inexplicable phenomenon," Asbury said.

But viewed in the context of loyalty to one's neighbors and one's community, the anti- snitching ethos is consistent with social norms to which everyone subscribes, Asbury said.

"Each and every one of us has a number of different loyalties," Asbury said, observing that groups of people commonly close ranks. "Doctors, other professionals, police officers - all of them tend not to tell on each other."

Tibbs, a criminal law expert, explored the death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed man who was fatally shot by police who were responding to complaints of a fight aboard a commuter train in Oakland, Calif. The police, having received no description of the suspects in the fight, singled out several African American men, including Grant, who was shot as he laid face-down on the station platform, Tibbs said.

The 2009 incident, Tibbs said, exemplifies the persistence of racism in the post- Civil Rights era and the ways in which policing helps to perpetuate racial inequality.

"Law protects police violence when it pretends that race does not matter when policing young African American men or other people of color," Tibbs said.

While Tibbs and Asbury focused on the values at stake with laws in the public sphere, Cimino focused on a perennial debate in legal circles over laws in the private realm, namely contracts.

Legal scholars have long divided themselves into two camps, depending on whether they think contract law is driven by economics or by rights, Cimino said.

But Cimino said contracts are both a social and an economic institution, and she noted that none other than Adam Smith, an undisputed champion of free market economics, called for "humanity, justice, generosity and public spirit."

Justice Benjamin Cardozo seemed to acknowledge as much in the landmark opinion in Jacob and Youngs v. Kent, a case involving a construction contract that went to the Supreme Court in 1921. In the ruling, Cimino said, Cardozo balanced economic interests and rights, coming out on the side of human flourishing.