Chase Celebrates Professor Book Publishing

Professor Michael Mannheimer of Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law is using old words to create a new concept for police in law enforcement.

Professor Mannheimer is the author of The Fourth Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Policing, published recently by University of Michigan Press. In the book and speaking engagements around the nation, Professor Mannheimer proposes that a reimaging of two amendments to the United States Constitution ‒ the Fourth, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure, and the Fourteenth, which applies the prohibition to state laws ‒ could reduce the number of deadly police encounters with citizens throughout the nation.

Professor Mannheimer will present readings from his book March 27, beginning at 5 p.m., in the Votruba Student Union on the Northern Kentucky University campus. He will also discuss his theory in a question-and-answer session with Chase Professor John Bickers, prior to a reception and book signing.

His reimaging seeks to eliminate a major factor in confrontations between police and citizens ‒ the amount of discretion individual officers can exercise in deciding whether to detain or enforce a law against one person but not another.

“The big problem with excessively broad discretion is under-enforcement – the discretion police have to ignore infractions by the privileged many and enforce the law only against the unlucky few,” Professor Mannheimer says.

Professor Mannheimer has been a member of the Chase faculty since 2004, and has taught courses in criminal law, criminal trial procedure, the death penalty, evidence and sentencing.