Fear the Law: Codifying Fear Through the Objectification of the Law

Despite the social and legal resonance of fear events, fear has received little academic attention as a mechanism for creating and entrenching law in the United States. Importantly, long after the fear stimulus fades from social discourse, the law remains, sometimes in ways that are not obviously derivative of the original fear object. Consequently, understanding fear as an origin of law is of heightened importance. In this Article, we analyze various domains of law using experimental digital surveys and detailed case study analysis to unveil the fear principle that demonstrates how fear becomes law.We examine the lawmaking potential of fear through the process of objectification. To do so, we dissect the multidimensionality of objects—the social, the tangible, and the legal—and explain how overidentification with one dimension of an object leads to a process of objectification. From there, we consider how the unique emotional capacity of fear can accelerate the process of objectification to create law. In doing so, we craft and empirically test an interdisciplinary definition of fear. Through five case studies: the 1976 Crime Wave Against the Elderly, the Satanic Panic, the Juvenile Superpredator Myth, the Creepy Clown Conspiracy, and the Fentanyl Contact Overdose Myth, we trace the objectification of fear into law and identify key elements needed for objectification to occur. Critically, none of these fear objects were real—but we argue that realness is not necessary for a wave of fear to create law. We end the Article with our theoretical contribution of the Fear Principle: an analytic tool designed to help scholars and policymakers identify the legal objectification of fear.