"Mention the phrase "Homeland Security" and heated debates emerge about state uses and abuses of legal authority. However, even before its recent growth, the power to police had represented a vast expansion of legislative and regulative power at all levels of U.S. governance, from the federal government down to the smallest municipalities. Dubber explores the roots of the power to police - the most expansive and least limitable of governmental powers - by focusing on its most obvious and problematic manifestation: criminal law. He argues that the primary characteristics of this power, including the inability to accurately define it, reflect its origins in the discretionary and virtually limitless patriarchal power of the householder over his household"--BOOK JACKET.