Right or Privilege? The History of Driver’s Licenses in California

In this dissertation, I examine the history of the driver’s license in California – drawing on legal and transportation history literature to better understand how licensing policies promoted automobility but also left behind certain drivers. Over the course of the twentieth century, adults increasingly needed to drive. The more essential a driver’s license was for daily life, the more effective the threat of its suspension. In a series of consequential court decisions in the late 1920s and early 1930s, California courts increasingly held that driving was not a fundamental right but a privilege. Progressively, driver’s license suspensions became a generic government enforcement technique; California and most other states continue to use suspensions to enforce a wide range of statutes, and violations that trigger them can be found in various government code sections. Policymakers use license suspensions as leverage for social control and as a tool to generate revenue, such as enforcing child support payments and coercing drivers to pay outstanding fines and fees. From the beginning the driver’s license was a regulatory tool that allowed most drivers to travel relatively undisturbed. Minority drivers, however, were most likely to be stopped by law enforcement and punished in the courts and, therefore, to feel the sting of a suspension and the additional criminal and monetary penalties of getting caught driving without a license. In metropolitan areas built around the automobile, and underserved by public transit modes, the consequences of being without a driver’s license are far-reaching. To redress the inequities and harmful consequences associated with driver’s license policy, it is important to first diagnose the cause and scope of the problem. In this dissertation, I provide a history of the driver’s license in California to understand both the ubiquity and eclecticism in the ways the license has been used, and how race/ethnicity and income are implicated. This st