There is a piece of pedestrian wisdom so obvious that nobody thinks it requires a political philosophy: having the right of way does not make it safe to step in front of a moving truck. You may be standing at a marked crosswalk with the WALK signal illuminated. The driver may have a red light. The traffic code may be completely unambiguous about which of you is entitled to proceed. If the driver nevertheless fails to stop, none of those facts will alter the mass of the truck, shorten its stopping distance, or make your femur more resistant to fracture. You can be legally right, morally right, factually right and catastrophically injured at exactly the same time. Looking both ways before crossing does not surrender your right of way, excuse the driver, endorse reckless driving or transfer responsibility for the collision to you. It means only that you understand the difference between a rule governing another person's conduct and a physical mechanism capable of preventing that person from violating the rule.
We understand this distinction effortlessly when trucks are involved, yet we have developed a strange tendency to forget it when the subject becomes constitutional rights, policing, protest, institutional responsibility and personal safety. Somewhere along the way, the sentence “they are not allowed to do that” begins quietly transforming into “they cannot do that.” The first statement is about law. The second sounds as though it is about physics. Those are radically different propositions, and confusing them can become dangerous long before a judge gets an opportunity to straighten things out.
The law is not a force field.
I mean that almost literally. The Constitution does not surround an American citizen with a transparent membrane through which government power cannot pass. The First Amendment does not physically prevent a police officer from arresting somebody for protected speech. The Fourth Amendment does not make an unreasonable search mechanically impossible. A statute prohibiting discrimination does not prevent an employer from discriminating. A contract does not prevent somebody from breaching it. A restraining order does not erect an invisible wall around the person it protects. What law does, among many other things, is establish rules, duties, prohibitions, procedures and remedies so that conduct can be restrained prospectively when possible and judged afterward when prevention fails. The existence of a legal remedy is itself an acknowledgment that people sometimes do things they are forbidden to do.
Federal civil-rights law makes this particularly plain. Section 1983 of Title 42 provides a civil cause of action against people who, acting under color of state law, deprive someone of rights secured by the Constitution and federal law. The statute is tremendously important, but notice the chronology embedded in the concept: a person has been deprived of a right and seeks a remedy for that deprivation. The courthouse is enormously powerful, but the courthouse is downstream from the event.
That temporal distinction is the whole subject of this essay. It is also why I want to dispose immediately of an especially dangerous variation of the force-field fantasy: the idea that legal remedies themselves can make physical risk worth taking. I am not claiming that most protesters think this way, nor am I attributing the calculation to any particular person. But anyone who does begin calculating that an unlawful arrest, an unjustified shove, an excessive-force incident or some other well-documented civil-rights violation could produce a handsome settlement is playing an extraordinarily peculiar lottery. There is no control on the encounter that allows you to select “injured enough to collect $2 million, but healthy enough to enjoy it.” Human bodies and chaotic confrontations do not have settlement-value settings.
A shove can become a fall. A fall can become a traumatic brain injury. A supposedly less-lethal projectile can destroy an eye. A vehicle can move six feet when someone expected it to move two. A hand can disappear from view. An officer can misunderstand a movement. A frightened person can make an impulsive decision. A person who expected to spend a night in jail and become the sympathetic plaintiff in an excellent civil-rights case can instead spend months learning to walk again. In the worst version of this grotesque lottery, the plaintiff never receives the award at all. The estate does. The surviving family members may eventually receive money from the government while wishing more than anything that there had never been a cause of action in the first place.
A large civil judgment should therefore never be confused with evidence that the law protected somebody from injury. Quite often it means exactly the opposite. Damages are an attempt to compensate for something the legal prohibition failed to prevent. Money can pay medical bills, replace lost earnings, punish certain forms of misconduct and acknowledge an injustice. It cannot restore the afternoon before the injury occurred. A legal system can assign a monetary value to blindness. It cannot give somebody the eye back.
This is not an argument for meekness, obedience or allowing government officials to do whatever they please. It is certainly not an argument that excessive force becomes justified when the person receiving it has behaved foolishly or offensively. It is an argument for maintaining separate ledgers that political arguments constantly try to collapse into one. There is the question of legal authority: what was each person legally entitled to do? There is the question of responsibility: who caused the situation, escalated it, behaved recklessly or violated another person's rights? And there is the question of risk: regardless of who is right, what is physically capable of happening during the next ten seconds? A person can answer the first two questions perfectly and still make a disastrous mistake about the third.
Why Are You Using Real Bullets?
The death of Renée Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, is worth discussing here precisely because I do not need to settle the enormous political and legal argument surrounding her death in order to make this point. Good was fatally shot during an encounter with federal immigration agents. Federal authorities and critics of the shooting offered sharply different interpretations of what happened and whether the use of deadly force was justified. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension initially expected to participate in a joint investigation with the FBI but said the arrangement changed later that day, leaving the FBI in charge and the state agency without the access to evidence and interviews it said it needed for a complete investigation. The BCA subsequently said it remained willing to participate if federal authorities resumed cooperation.
Those disputes matter enormously. They matter to Good's family, to the agent, to the government and to anybody who cares about the lawful use of state power. They are also unnecessary to my argument. If the shooting is ultimately judged legally justified, the law was not a force field. If it is ultimately judged unjustified, the law was still not a force field. The legal conclusion changes responsibility. It cannot change what happened on January 7.
In video recorded immediately after the shooting, Good's wife, Becca, can be heard asking, “Why did you have real bullets?” I want to be exceedingly careful with that sentence. A woman who has just watched her wife be shot is not delivering a seminar on constitutional theory. Shock is not testimony about what somebody rationally believed before a traumatic event, and it would be indecent to diagnose Becca Good's politics, intelligence or state of mind from words spoken in that condition. I am interested in the sentence for another reason. Taken entirely on its own terms, it captures with awful economy the difference between the institutional world we imagine and the physical world we inhabit.
The bullets were real because the guns were real. The agents were not actors portraying federal agents in a civic pageant. Their weapons were not theatrical representations of state authority. They were people carrying equipment capable of injuring and killing other human beings, operating in an environment in which decisions could become irreversible almost immediately. Whatever restrictions the Constitution, federal law, departmental policy and the law of deadly force placed upon their use of those weapons, none of those restrictions altered what the weapons physically were.
That sounds almost insultingly obvious when written down, which is exactly why the sentence bothers me. There are circumstances in modern American life in which people seem to approach armed state power with an extraordinary confidence that the rules governing that power also guarantee its restraint. A person can scream at an armed officer, insult him, call him a racist, a fascist, a coward or anything else the First Amendment may protect in the circumstances, and there may be an extremely strong legal argument that none of those words permits the officer to strike or shoot him. Fine. That still leaves the entirely separate question of whether deliberately creating an emotionally charged, face-to-face confrontation with an armed stranger is a sensible way to test the proposition.
The First Amendment can be on your side while the person standing six inches away is angry, frightened, confused, poorly trained, exhausted, mistaken about your intentions or simply bad at his job. The right remains a right. Your possession of it does not improve his judgment.
This is where accusations of “victim blaming” tend to enter the discussion, and I think the accusation often prevents adults from discussing risk intelligently. Responsibility and prudence are not mutually exclusive concepts. If I tell my friend to look both ways before crossing the street, I am not announcing a new legal doctrine under which motorists may mow down inattentive pedestrians. If I tell someone not to leave an expensive laptop visible on the passenger seat of an unlocked car, I have not legalized theft. If I tell someone that getting inches from an armed officer and deliberately trying to enrage him increases the possibility of an ugly encounter, I have not granted the officer any additional authority whatsoever. The officer's legal obligations remain exactly where they were.
This distinction used to be called prudence.
Rights and Remedies Are Different Things
American constitutional law itself contains some bracing reminders that government is not a universal guarantor of personal safety. In DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the Supreme Court confronted an appalling case involving a child who suffered catastrophic abuse by his father despite extensive involvement by social services. The Court held that the Due Process Clause generally does not impose an affirmative constitutional obligation on the state to protect an individual from private violence. The constitutional protection against deprivation of liberty by the state was not, in the Court's understanding, a general guarantee that the state would successfully protect a person from other people. The distinction is morally uncomfortable precisely because the underlying facts were horrific, but it demonstrates how far the actual constitutional structure can be from the popular notion that possessing rights means government has undertaken to keep each of us safe.
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales is perhaps even more brutal as an illustration. Jessica Gonzales had obtained a restraining order against her estranged husband. He abducted their three daughters, and after repeated attempts by Gonzales to get police to enforce the order, he eventually arrived at a police station and opened fire. Police killed him and discovered the bodies of the three girls in his truck. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected Gonzales's procedural due-process claim that she possessed a constitutionally protected property interest in police enforcement of the restraining order. The precise legal issue was technical and the decision remains controversial, but the human lesson is much simpler: an order bearing the authority of a court is still an order. It is not a wall.
That does not make restraining orders useless. It explains why they are useful. They establish legal boundaries and enable enforcement. They create consequences. They provide evidence and authority for intervention. In many cases those mechanisms undoubtedly deter conduct that otherwise would occur. But deterrence is probabilistic. Paper cannot tackle a person approaching your front door. The order becomes physically effective only through the behavior of human beings who know about it, respect it or enforce it.
We understand the same distinction perfectly well in ordinary private law. A contract does not prevent breach. If contracts prevented breaches, contract litigation would barely exist. A lease does not prevent a landlord from doing something prohibited by the lease. Employment law does not physically prevent unlawful discrimination. Criminal statutes do not make murder impossible. Indeed, every criminal prosecution demonstrates the obvious point that declaring conduct illegal and making conduct physically impossible are not remotely the same enterprise.
Yet the language of rights encourages a peculiar psychological slippage because rights are properly described in categorical terms. You have the right. The government may not violate it. The officer cannot lawfully do this. All of that is correct, but “cannot lawfully” can lose its final word in ordinary conversation until “cannot” begins carrying more weight than it deserves. An officer cannot lawfully use objectively unreasonable force under the Fourth Amendment. An officer obviously remains physically capable of doing so, which is why excessive-force litigation exists in the first place. Federal prosecutors themselves describe use-of-force analysis as requiring evaluation of whether force was objectively unreasonable while recognizing that officers can be forced to make judgments in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving.
The legal system then performs one of civilization's most important tricks: it slows everything down. Video can be viewed frame by frame. Witnesses can be interviewed separately. Forensic evidence can be collected. Lawyers can research precedent. Experts can reconstruct trajectories. Judges can hear motions. Jurors can deliberate. Appellate courts can review what the trial court did. Questions that had to be confronted amid noise, movement and adrenaline can eventually receive hundreds of pages of briefs and opinions.
This is wonderful. It is also exactly the opposite of a force field.
The person standing in the street does not have appellate time.
The Sanitization of Civil Disobedience
Some of our confusion may come from the way successful protest movements are remembered. History compresses. Decades become chapters; chapters become paragraphs; paragraphs become photographs. Eventually we remember Rosa Parks sitting peacefully on a bus, Martin Luther King Jr. speaking from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and then Congress passing landmark civil-rights legislation. The moral arc becomes so smooth in retrospect that it is easy to forget what the people inside the events actually experienced.
The people who practiced nonviolent civil disobedience did not possess a theory that nonviolence made them physically safe. Quite the contrary. The power of the method depended partly on their willingness to accept danger without answering violence with violence. Civil-rights demonstrators were arrested, beaten, attacked by dogs, knocked down by high-pressure fire hoses and murdered. Freedom Riders did not board buses because federal law created an invisible protective bubble around interstate travelers. They boarded knowing that the law and the physical reality on the ground could be separated by an enormous and dangerous distance.
That distinction matters because modern protest can sometimes inherit the iconography of civil disobedience without inheriting its understanding of danger. Nonviolence was not a guarantee that the other side would also be nonviolent. Moral legitimacy was not expected to render clubs soft. A constitutional right to assemble did not make an angry crowd, hostile police department or violent opponent physically incapable of hurting anybody.
This is one reason the question “Why are you using real bullets?” is so haunting. There was never a historical period in which the coercive apparatus of the state consisted only of symbols. Government ultimately possesses the capacity to compel behavior through physical force. Democratic government surrounds that power with law, training, accountability, elections, judicial review, civil liability, internal discipline and constitutional restrictions because coercive power is dangerous. The restrictions are not evidence that the danger has disappeared. They exist because it has not.
Institutions Care Differently Than People Do
There is a related mistake in the way we talk about institutional care. Universities now routinely speak the language of safety, wellness, belonging, mental health and community. Employers do it. Government agencies do it. Schools do it. Large organizations increasingly sound less like contractual institutions performing defined functions and more like unusually well-funded parents.
Individual people inside those organizations may care about you enormously. A professor can genuinely worry about a student. A supervisor can care deeply about an employee. A police officer can risk his life for a stranger. An administrator can lose sleep over someone in crisis. Nothing in this argument requires the bleak assumption that everybody inside an institution is a sociopath reading from a liability manual.
The institution itself, however, does not love you. It has policies, incentives, legal duties, insurance, public-relations concerns, budgets, regulatory obligations, lawyers, risk managers and institutional interests. Sometimes those interests align beautifully with yours. Sometimes they do not. The fact that an institution maintains an office devoted to your safety does not mean it has accepted responsibility for every danger you encounter, much less acquired the ability to eliminate it.
This is where I part company with a certain progressive conception of safety that seems increasingly willing to outsource personal risk assessment to institutions. If an institution says an environment is safe, if the activity is constitutionally protected, if trained authorities have rules governing their conduct, if there are cameras everywhere and lawyers available afterward, there can emerge a confidence that somebody else has already performed the dangerous part of the calculation.
But nobody can outsource physics.
This is not uniquely a progressive vice. Conservatives perform their own version whenever they assume that police officers, soldiers, churches, corporations or political leaders are trustworthy because those institutions belong to their cultural team. The conservative who says, “I haven't done anything wrong, so why would I need a lawyer?” is wearing his own constitutional force field. So is the businessman who says a counterparty “can't” do something because the contract prohibits it. So is the gun owner who imagines that possession of a weapon has eliminated rather than altered his risk. Human beings are extraordinarily talented at turning systems they trust into imaginary guarantees.
The progressive version interests me because contemporary protest culture can combine very expansive ideas about institutional responsibility for personal safety with extremely confrontational behavior toward the armed representatives of those same institutions. There is something difficult to reconcile about believing that a university bears substantial responsibility for protecting one's psychological safety while simultaneously assuming that a federal agent carrying a sidearm and a rifle will maintain perfect emotional regulation while being screamed at from inches away. The agent should maintain that regulation. His training, authority and weaponry give him a greater obligation to do so, not a smaller one. But “should” is precisely the word around which this entire essay revolves.
The truck should stop.
Look anyway.
Prudence Is Not Cowardice
There is a temptation to treat personal risk management as capitulation, particularly in political movements built around resistance. If I alter my behavior because another person might behave unlawfully, haven't I allowed intimidation to work? If I refrain from saying something because a police officer might respond improperly, haven't I surrendered my First Amendment rights? If everybody behaved that way, wouldn't government misconduct become self-enforcing?
Sometimes, yes. There are circumstances in which exercising a right despite danger is morally necessary. Nearly every political freedom we possess was defended at some point by people willing to accept risks that a purely actuarial analysis would have told them to avoid. I am profoundly grateful that such people exist. A society consisting entirely of people who retreat whenever power threatens them would not remain free for very long.
But accepting a risk knowingly is categorically different from denying that the risk exists. Courage requires the first. Delusion requires the second.
A Freedom Rider who knew a bus might be attacked and boarded anyway made a moral choice about the relative value of personal safety and political action. Someone who boards because “they can't attack us, that's illegal” has misunderstood both the adversary and the nature of law. Two people can perform the same physical act while operating from completely different understandings of reality.
That is the distinction I want restored. I am not arguing that nobody should confront power, protest, engage in civil disobedience or deliberately risk injury for a cause. I am arguing that anyone doing those things should understand that constitutional protection determines legal rights, not ballistic outcomes. If you decide that a principle is worth risking your body for, at least know that this is the transaction you are making. Do not convert courage into magical thinking by assuming that the existence of a right has eliminated the price you have decided you are willing to pay.
The same applies at a much smaller scale. You can assert every right available to you during an encounter with police while still keeping your hands visible, maintaining distance, avoiding sudden movements and deciding that the sidewalk is not the ideal venue in which to win a constitutional argument. Compliance in the moment does not necessarily mean agreement. A courtroom exists precisely because there are disputes that are safer to conduct with lawyers than with adrenaline.
There are limits to that advice, obviously. Authorities can abuse demands for compliance. Governments throughout history have described dissent itself as disorder. Police commands can be unlawful. People who obediently comply can still be injured or killed. Nothing about prudent behavior guarantees safety either. That would simply replace one imaginary force field with another.
Risk management is not omnipotence. It is probability.
The Awful Meaning of “Eventually”
One of the most seductive phrases in American civic life is “the courts will sort it out.” Often they do, and thank God for that. But consider how much human experience is concealed inside the future tense.
Eventually the conviction may be reversed. Eventually the search may be declared unconstitutional. Eventually the officer may be disciplined. Eventually the government may settle. Eventually the employee may win the discrimination case. Eventually the landlord may be ordered to pay damages. Eventually the appellate court may publish an opinion establishing that what happened was unlawful all along.
Before eventually comes everything else.
That is not a criticism of courts. Careful adjudication takes time because careful adjudication should take time. Evidence needs to be collected. Both sides deserve to be heard. Facts are disputed. Law is complicated. Governments and defendants have rights too. The alternative to retrospective deliberation is often immediate judgment without adequate information, which creates dangers of its own.
But the unavoidable consequence is that law operates on a different clock from physical reality. An event may become irreversible in a fraction of a second while the legal system requires years to decide exactly what that fraction of a second meant. Qualified-immunity doctrine adds another layer in civil litigation involving government officials, asking not merely whether a right was violated in applicable cases but whether the right was sufficiently clearly established under existing law. The doctrine is explicitly intended to balance accountability for irresponsible exercises of power against protecting officials performing their duties reasonably. Whatever one thinks of where courts have struck that balance, its very existence demonstrates how much legal analysis can stand between an injury and a remedy.
There is therefore nothing inconsistent about believing fiercely in constitutional rights while behaving cautiously around people capable of violating them. In fact, I think the two positions belong together. I want government power constrained precisely because I understand that government power is real. I want courts available precisely because officers, prosecutors, bureaucrats, presidents and legislatures can be wrong. I want damages available precisely because injuries cannot always be prevented. I want restraining orders precisely because dangerous people sometimes need to be restrained. The institutions of law are necessary because human beings are fallible, emotional, self-interested, frightened, tribal, occasionally malicious and frequently mistaken.
Treating those institutions as magical protection misunderstands the reason we built them.
Look Both Ways
So I return to the crosswalk because the crosswalk contains almost the entire argument without requiring a law degree.
You approach the curb. The signal says WALK. The approaching truck has a red light. The driver is legally obligated to stop. You are legally entitled to proceed. If he runs the light and strikes you, the fact that you looked both ways would not make him less responsible. The fact that you failed to look would not magically give him a green light. The legal questions remain legal questions.
But before stepping off the curb, you look at the truck.
You do not do this because you distrust the concept of traffic law. You do it because you understand why traffic law exists. Trucks are heavy. Drivers make mistakes. Brakes fail. People look at phones. Human beings misunderstand signals. Occasionally somebody deliberately runs a red light. The law can deter those things, punish those things and compensate some of their consequences. It cannot guarantee that they will not happen to you this afternoon.
That habit of mind should travel with us beyond the intersection. Your constitutional rights are real. Your civil rights are real. Your contractual rights are real. Your right to protest is real. The duties imposed upon police officers are real. The restrictions placed upon government are real. Court orders are real. Civil remedies are real. None of them should be surrendered merely because someone capable of violating them happens to be standing nearby.
But the nearby person is real too.
His anger is real. His fear is real. His mistakes are real. The pavement is real. The truck is real. The gun is real.
And the bullets are real.
The law can tell us afterward who was wrong. It can sometimes compensate the person who was wronged. It can punish misconduct, establish precedent, change policy and make the next violation less likely. At its best, it can take an injury suffered by one human being and turn it into a rule that protects millions of others.
That is an astonishing power.
It just isn't a force field.
Excellent piece. If I were your editor, though, I'd have said, split it in two and cut 25%. :)