Abstract

I argue that police violence is supported by a legal infrastructure of cultivated ambiguity and indeterminacy. I turn to David Dyzenhaus' concept of a "legal grey hole" and argue that one is being constructed by the federal judiciary to immunize police violence. Such a legal grey hole is being constructed through the layering of legal time frames—various juridical constructions of time that ban the judgment of hindsight, cultivate procedural complexity, and grant "qualified immunity". In the conclusion, I argue that this legal grey hole is being formed, in part, by a redeployment of certain rule of law values to produce their opposite.

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