ABSTRACT
In 1865 Mr. Crandall, a Nevada stagecoach operator, transported his passengers across state lines. In 1939 Fred Edwards left California for Texas to pick up his out-of-work brother-in-law, Frank Duncan, and bring him back to California. In 1958 Rockwell Kent, an artist and member of the Communist Party, attempted to visit the World Council of Peace in Helsinki. In 1964 six white men harassed a number of anonymous black men living in Athens, Georgia, to such a degree that they found it impossible to leave home. In 1966, nineteen-year-old Vivian Shapiro left Massachusetts with her child to live with her mother in Hartford, Connecticut. None of these people knew each other, but their practices of mobility (or attempted mobility) became linked through a process of legal reasoning about the status of mobility as a right in the United States. Courts make decisions based on previous decisions through the process of precedent. Thus, Crandall’s story came to bear on Edwards’s story, and Edwards’s story on Kent’s story, and so on. In previous chapters we have seen how mobilities are produced through forms of abstraction such as photography, motion studies, and choreographies. In this chapter we explore other forms of abstraction— law, rights, and citizenship—in order to see how mobilities are produced in the courtroom. In order to do this, let us return to the second of our stories, that of Duncan and Edwards.
