My guest today is Sadie Blanchard, a Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. She teaches and writes about contracts, corporations, and international business law. Her research examines how legal institutions interact with social forces to shape behavior, especially in markets. She’s here today to discuss her recent article, Contract or Prison, in the University of Chicago Law Review. The paper discusses the expansion and privatization of “Incarceration Alternative” arrangements, such as electronic monitoring, criminal diversion, and parole and probation. Blanchard argues that, while the norm of expanded choice that justifies enforcement of contracts has prima facie plausibility in this context, the agreements ultimately fail under classical contract theory because they are made against the background of entitlements created to extract value from people using the coercive power of the criminal legal system. This episode is co-hosted by UVA Law 3L, Kyndall Walker.

Show Notes

About Sadie Blanchard

About Kim Krawiec

About Kyndall Walker

Sandie Blanchard, Contract or Prison (forthcoming, University of Chicago Law Review 2025)

Additional Reading Discussed (or relevant to the discussion):

John H. Langbein, Understanding the Short History of Plea Bargaining, 13 Law & Society Review 261 (1979)

John H. Langbein, Torture and Plea Bargaining, 46 Univ. Chicago Law Review 4 (1978); republished in Spanish as “Tortura Y Plea Bargaining,” in El Procedimiento Abreviado (J.B. Maier & A. Bovino eds.) (Buenos Aires 2001); substantially republished in The Public Interest (Winter 1980) at 43; latter version republished in The Public Interest on Crime and Punishment (N. Glazer ed. 1984)

Robert E. Scott & William J. Stuntz, Plea-Bargaining as a Social Contract, 101 Yale L. J. 1909 (1992). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/317

Emma Kaufman, "The Prisoner Trade," 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1815 (2020)