Vigilance or vigilantism? Old laws’ legacy in modern US.

The Rittenhouse trial, the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers, and Texas’ controversial abortion law all point to some Americans’ increasing desire to aggressively police others’ behavior. The trend has echoes of vigilantism’s long history in the U.S.

Two high-profile murder trials coming to a close in the U.S. pose a challenging question: To what extent can a regular citizen legally take on the duties of an armed agent of the state?

On the shores of Lake Michigan, a jury is weighing evidence against a teenager who killed two people and wounded a third after bringing a military-grade rifle to a city gripped by social unrest.

A thousand miles away, in Brunswick, Georgia, prosecutors have charged three white men with murder for chasing down, cornering, and then killing a Black jogger named Ahmaud Arbery. The men said they were trying to execute a citizen’s arrest. The man who fired his shotgun said he did it in self-defense after Mr. Arbery, who carried neither gun nor stolen goods, turned on his pursuers. 

The trial dynamics have left Americans scrambling to unspool the implications of what Harvard historian Caroline Light calls a “tortured tangle of old and very new laws” that together are transforming the nature of protest and citizenship.