Social Murder

Failing to protect the vulnerable in a manner that caused them to die avoidable deaths, such as leaving homeless people to freeze to death on freezing nights, is "social murder."

The concept of social murder has been adopted into British legal and sociological lexicons to conceptualize the State’s reckless sacrifices of its most vulnerable populations—people deemed socially undesirable, legally undeserving, and economically redundant—to avoidable and premature deaths. The State allows these populations to die a multitude of deaths by failing to protect them; notably, victims of social murder are relegated to society’s underclasses, if not completely excluded from the body politic, before they are physically eliminated. Social murder is neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing; instead, social murder captures the elimination of groups of people via atrocious events for which the State bears indirect or partial responsibility, through calculated abandonment instead of specific intent.

Social murder takes place in the United States, too, though it has yet to be recognized. This Article undertakes the task of introducing the concept of social murder into the American legal lexicon, explaining how the United States employs social murder as a necropolitical governance technology, and sounding an alarm concerning the likely increase in social murders as corporate authoritarianism threatens to overtake the democratic rule of law. The Article makes the claim that because instances of social murder in the United States necessarily involve breaches of enforceable agreements as well as the democratic social contract, social murder is best analyzed through social contracting theory. Social murder should be viewed not simply as catastrophe, but as either extreme breach of the social contract, or as the performance and enforcement of an antisocial contract governing the subjugation and elimination of social murder’s victims.

Marissa Jackson Sow, "Social Murder" Washington and Lee Law Review (Forthcoming) on SSRN.