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“I'm Giving You a Lawful Order”: Dialogic Legitimacy in Sandra Bland's Traffic Stop

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Belén V. Lowrey-Kinberg  and
Grace Sullivan Buker
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Abstract

On July 10, 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland was stopped by State Trooper Officer Brian Encinia for failing to signal a lane change. What began as a routine traffic stop quickly devolved into shouting, a physical confrontation, and Bland's subsequent arrest. We use discourse analysis to examine the rapid escalation of this encounter with a focus on procedural justice (Sunshine & Tyler 2003) and the dialogic approach to legitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe 2012). In analyzing the transcript of Sandra Bland's traffic stop, we address several key questions: How is procedural justice manifested linguistically? Can the dialogic legitimacy framework be used to understand the dynamics of individual police-citizen interactions? The conclusions of this analysis provide an interdisciplinary view of how procedural justice and legitimacy are manifested and negotiated in a police-citizen interaction.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 379 - 412
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors extend their gratitude to Eliezer Kinberg for providing the inspiration for this study as well as Roger W. Shuy, Justice Tankebe, Edward R. Maguire, and the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

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