Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, has built his career around a deceptively simple question: what happens to those who knew and did nothing?
His new book, *Enablers: Normalizing the Unimaginable*, makes a legal and moral case for holding those people criminally responsible for the harm they allowed to continue.
Guiora is also the director of the Bystander Initiative, a project focused on understanding and reshaping the legal obligations of those who witness or enable wrongdoing.
His path to this work is unusual, having moved from serving as an officer in the IDF JAG Corps to becoming a legal scholar focused on institutional accountability and victim protection.
The central argument of his work draws a sharp distinction between a perpetrator and an enabler, a line that current legal frameworks have largely failed to enforce in any meaningful way.
Guiora defines the enabler precisely: someone who knows of harm because of their position or authority, is able to prevent it, and instead chooses to protect the institution or the leader over the vulnerable person.
This definition places the enabler in a morally and legally distinct category from the passive bystander, because their inaction is not born of ignorance but of deliberate institutional loyalty.
He argues that legal systems have made progress in criminalising the bystander who witnesses harm and does nothing, but have left a significant gap when it comes to the enabler who actively shields the person causing harm.
That gap, in Guiora’s view, is not a technical oversight but a structural failure that repeatedly allows institutions to protect themselves at the expense of the people they are supposed to serve.
His work through the Bystander Initiative seeks to push legislators, legal scholars, and the public to reckon with that failure and consider what a more accountable legal standard might look like.
The book arrives at a moment when questions of institutional cover-up and leadership complicity are being raised across sectors, from sports organisations to religious bodies to corporate boardrooms.
Guiora’s broader argument is that normalising the unimaginable begins not with perpetrators but with the people around them who choose silence and self-preservation over intervention.
By giving academic and legal rigour to these questions, he is working to ensure that the voices of those harmed by enablers are no longer absent from the law itself.