Simonson and Ahmed on Legal Satire in an Age of Political Repression

Jocelyn Simonson, Brooklyn Law School, and Zohra Ahmed, Boston University School of Law, are publishing Legal Satire in an Age of Political Repression in volume 74 of the Buffalo Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Central to the political repression of left social movements is the use of the criminal law to target movement work. One of the blueprints for the Trump Administration's current campaign of collective criminalization is a RICO conspiracy case brought by the Georgia Attorney General against 61 organizers and activists in the movement to Stop Cop City in Atlanta in 2023. In this Article, we tell the story of a creative tactic through which the movement to Stop Cop City resisted the conspiracy and RICO charges against them, charges which were dismissed in December 2025. In doing so, this Article also recounts a longer history stretching back to the first Red Scare of how left social movements have devised creative, strategic, and galvanizing ways to combat repressive criminalization. This Article’s analysis centers on the “People’s RICO,” a 2023 parody crafted by lawyers, organizers, and artists in response to the real RICO prosecution brought by the state that same month. In the short film, the People’s RICO issues its own RICO indictment, condemning a counter-conspiracy between state and private actors. This Article presents a reading of the People’s RICO that connects it to the history of social movements responding to conspiracy prosecutions with their own accusations of counter-conspiracies on the part of those in power. The Article reads the People’s RICO parody on three levels: satire, structural analysis, and legal imaginary. First, the film ridicules the genre of theatrical law enforcement press conferences to expose it for what it really is: the state silencing its opponents. Second, the People’s RICO uses the legal concepts of conspiracy and RICO to identify and indict the law and political economy of the carceral state, found within the tangle of public and private actors advancing their plans for a police training facility for their collective material enrichment. Third, the film imagines another world in which a group of lawyers representing the “People,” can reclaim legal forms and political power to condemn state and corporate actors that have deployed their prosecutorial power for political gain. But that hope for accountability is partial and qualified. The conspiracy and counter-conspiracy accusations between the State’s RICO and the People’s RICO help underscore contemporary anti-carceral movements’ ambivalent relationship to the legal form, and the legal form’s imperfect fit for a nuanced abolitionist praxis. Taken all together, the innovative approach of the People’s RICO should provide inspiration to movement actors, lawyers, and their allies in figuring out how to respond creatively to politically motivated prosecutions: by using the law without capitulating to its narrow horizons.