Roberts on The Vagrancy Law Model: Governing Through Social Contagion in the Anglo World, c. 1824-1932

Christopher M. Roberts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, has published The Vagrancy Law Model: Governing Through Social Contagion in the Anglo World, c. 1824–1932 as The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 2025-4. Here is the abstract.

This chapter aims to trace the nature and impact of what is termed the ‘vagrancy law model’ over the course of the century or so after passage of England’s influential Vagrancy Act 1824. Despite relative lack of attention, this chapter suggests the vagrancy law model has been enormously influential. In the view of Christopher Tiedeman, a late nineteenth-century American police power theorist, such laws were essential because the vagrant was ‘the chrysalis of every species of criminal’.1 From our perspective, we might say such laws were essential because, more than any other measures, they enabled the authorities’ criminal-making project.2 The power of the vagrancy law model has been enhanced by how little noticed and hence how little challenged it has been, a lack of attention cultivated both by the tendency of such laws to be linked to minor penalties, often administered through summary and less-judicialised processes, as well as through the stigma and sense of degradation and contaminatory threat generated by the ideological developments considered herein.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.