Pocket Résumé
AVLANA EISENBERG
Degrees: BA, Yale University, JD (with distinction), Stanford University. Credentials: Assistant Professor then Gary & Sallyn Pajcic Professor of Law, Florida State University College of Law; Fellow and Lecturer then Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School. Articles: NYU Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review,Southern California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, among other publications. Member: American Law Institute.
The Idea: In her recent scholarship, Dean’s Distinguished Scholar Avlana Eisenberg examines how decisions about whether to use force, arrest, or pursue punishment are formed and sustained within the context of policing and criminal law. “The stories we tell shape our understanding of the world and our place in it,” she explains, and those stories guide how actors interpret the situations in front of them. She points to a gap between the system’s claim to objectivity and what happens in practice, where decisions often hinge on interpretation, including who seems threatening, whose account is believed, and what counts as harm.
The Impact: In Policing the Danger Narrative, Eisenberg identifies a dominant account of risk in policing that she terms the “danger narrative.” This narrative casts policing as inherently dangerous and frames those encountered by police as potential sources of lethal harm. It is reinforced through training, recruitment messaging, and institutional rhetoric that emphasize the expectation of threat in routine encounters. Officers are taught to anticipate danger, and that expectation “influences decisions before any legal rule even comes into play.” This scholarship traces how this account of risk is incorporated into law; courts assessing claims of excessive force apply the “objective reasonableness” standard from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene. Since that perspective reflects the same training and assumptions about danger, judicial review often defers to officers’ stated perceptions of threat. Claims such as “I feared for my life” are treated as credible, even in contested circumstances, reinforcing the underlying narrative.
Eisenberg also details the effects of treating danger as pervasive. Empirical data, she shows in Policing the Danger Narrative, do not support claims that policing is constantly or increasingly dangerous. Risk varies by context, yet training and rhetoric present it as uniform. This mismatch can produce escalation: Officers primed to expect the worst may interpret ambiguous behavior as threatening and respond more aggressively, creating the conditions that appear to justify their initial perception. Eisenberg explains that “we often treat risk as if it were objective,” when, in fact, it is shaped by training and institutional culture.
Eisenberg focuses on how institutional actors are trained to interpret risk and harm, how those interpretations are reinforced by legal standards such as the reasonable officer test, and how they shape outcomes at each stage of the system.
This account has shaped discussions of reform by directing attention to the role of police culture in shaping outcomes. Efforts focused on regulating force through judicial outcomes or technology have not addressed how officers are trained to perceive risk. Eisenberg helps explain why those reforms may have limited effect when the underlying assumptions about danger remain unchanged.
In response, policy discussions have begun to include changes to training, the use of data to assess risk more precisely, and the involvement of non-police responders in situations such as mental health crises.
Another piece of Eisenberg’s scholarship, The Case for Mercy in Policing and Corrections, addresses decision-making at multiple points in the system. Eisenberg argues that opportunities for leniency arise throughout the criminal process, from initial encounters on the street to conditions of confinement. She defines mercy as a disposition toward compassion and argues that it should be cultivated through institutional practices rather than left to individual choice.
According to Eisenberg, “the key move” is to shift from viewing compassion as discretionary to embedding it in institutional design, including training, supervision, and evaluation. In the policing context, this approach requires changing how officers understand the people they encounter. As she explains, current policing practices often encourage officers to view those individuals as future offenders or threats, reinforcing an “us versus them” orientation. A disposition grounded in compassion instead treats those encounters as interactions within a shared community, which can affect decisions about whether to arrest, how to respond to noncompliance, and how to exercise discretion.
Eisenberg’s study in A Trauma-Centered Approach to Addressing Hate Crimes examines how the system defines harm. Hate crime laws are often justified on expressive grounds, sending messages of condemnation and solidarity. She argues that this framework captures only part of the injury. These crimes produce psychological harms that extend beyond individual victims to entire communities, including anxiety, isolation, and a sense of collective vulnerability. Criminal prosecution and sentencing enhancements do not address those harms in a comprehensive way, she explains: “The criminal legal system can play a role, but it shouldn’t be the only tool we rely on, especially for complex forms of harm like trauma or bias-based violence.” Instead, she points to alternatives such as restorative justice and trauma-informed interventions that operate alongside or outside the criminal process.Eisenberg continues to focus her scholarship on institutional actors and how their interpretations of risk and harm are reinforced by legal standards.
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