Doing Away with Disorderly Conduct

Disorderly conduct laws are weapons the powerful wield against the unpopular. All fifty states and many municipalities have disorderly conduct laws that criminalize speech and conduct ranging from unreasonable noise to opprobrious language. Although these laws are facially neutral, their astounding breadth and vagueness serve as a rubber stamp for law enforcement to surveil and criminally charge marginalized people. Their targets include communities of color, people with unpopular religious or political beliefs, and people whose mental health struggles render them incapable of complying with societal expectations of order. Although courts and scholars have criticized these laws for decades, none have explicitly called for their abolition. This Article does so. The Article examines both the constitutional flaws of disorderly conduct laws and the many societal harms they enable, before ultimately concluding that any minimal good they accomplish cannot justify the damage they inflict. Amidst a growing nation-al reckoning over the crisis of abusive and discriminatory policing, this Article provides a timely critique of the criminal laws that empower such policing. It uses disorderly conduct laws as a lens through which to examine the extraordinary costs of over-criminalization and the vulnerable people who most often bear the brunt of such costs. Although disorderly conduct laws are not the only criminal laws legislatures should consider eliminating, they are both constitutionally and socially problematic to a degree few other criminal laws achieve.