Around this time in 2012, the Florida Law Review agree to publish my article "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop" -- a piece I wrote about the way that black people are treated differently and worse than white people on the road. In the law and literature tradition, the piece uses both classical and popular culture to make a serious point about the harm of racial profiling. The piece is quite different from most of what I've written, and I enjoyed the opportunity to think about the law in a way that invoked some of my undergraduate training in English and music.
Then around this time in 2013, the article was quoted by Judge Andre Davis in a concurrence in the judgment in United States v. Mubdi, a published Fourth Circuit opinion. (The opinion was later reversed on other grounds.) My colleague Brooks Holland published a very thoughtful response to the article on the Florida Law Review's online companion, and colleagues Stephen Diamond and Ruthann Robson also wrote about the piece here and here.
I am proud of "The Open Road" -- perhaps not more so than my more traditional legal scholarship, but I am happy to have contributed something unique to legal discourse, to have caught the attention of a federal judge and a number of colleagues I greatly respect. Perhaps down the road (so to speak) I'll take a similar approach to a new topic.