Recap: The Highest Law in the Land: A Conversation with Jessica Pishko
The sheriff is one of the most powerful and least scrutinized figures in American law enforcement. That was the argument at the center of an evening with journalist, lawyer, and author Jessica Pishko, co-hosted by the Duke Justice Project, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, the Duke Decarceration Project, and the Duke Law chapters of the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild
Her book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, is the product of a decade of investigative reporting and historical research into an institution she argues is uniquely American, disproportionately influential, and almost entirely unexamined.
The conversation opened with a question that sounds deceptively simple: why sheriffs? Well, Pishko explained, the American sheriff has evolved into something with no real equivalent anywhere else. “Sheriffs are elected, which makes them inherently political.” They run county jails, make arrests, enforce evictions, and in many rural counties absorb functions well beyond traditional law enforcement — sometimes serving as 911 dispatch, animal control, and process server simultaneously. That sprawl matters. In North Carolina, the state's population is concentrated in roughly five counties, yet nearly 100 elected sheriffs hold office. If 95 of them show up at the state legislature to back a bill, the optics of that number can carry weight that misrepresents the underlying population. The distortion, Pishko explained, is not incidental to the problems she documents, but it is the source of them.
A central focus of the evening was the constitutional sheriff movement, which Pishko described as a conservative political identity built around the claim that sheriffs are the “ultimate arbiters of constitutional meaning” within their counties. In practice, this means centering the first ten amendments — with heavy emphasis on the Second Amendment — while sidelining later amendments that protect civil rights. "The idea that sheriffs simply do not have to follow laws they disagree with has become broadly mainstream," she noted, pointing to examples of recent fights in Washington State over standards for revoking a law enforcement officer’s license and in Maryland over ICE cooperation.
Nowhere is that dynamic more visible than in immigration enforcement. In North Carolina, sheriffs can grant ICE access to their jails without any formal agreement — creating what Pishko described as a “reliable funnel that is intentionally invisible to the public because jail-based arrests happen behind closed doors, not on streets.”
Asked whether the office has ever served progressive ends, she pointed to Reconstruction-era efforts after the Civil War to elect Black sheriffs in majority-Black counties as a form of protection against racial violence, and then to how swiftly those efforts were suppressed in the white backlash to Reconstruction.
The conversation also explored what replaces a sheriff in a rural county where no other infrastructure exists. Pishko's answer was about breaking up what sheriffs currently do: separating jails from patrol, reducing sheriffs' political concentration, and redirecting resources toward community services that can perform those functions more effectively and with greater accountability.
Pishko closed by turning to what she is paying most attention to over the next few months. Federal immigration enforcement is shifting, and local sheriffs are absorbing increasing pressure to take on that work, often without the promised compensation, and the pushback is starting to follow.
We are so grateful to have hosted Ms. Pishko at Duke to explore this pressing and relevant topic with students, faculty, and community members. Pick up a copy of The Highest Law in the Land here.