Ed note: This post is the first in a four-part series on Teaching Law and Political Economy through Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri by Angela Harris. Look out for the subsequent posts in the weeks to come!
Teaching Law and Political Economy through Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri
Part I: Criminal Justice and Slow Violence in Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri
Angela Harris –
More than ten years ago now, Emma Coleman Jordan of Georgetown Law Center called me on the phone and invited me to join her in what she laughingly called an act of “academic imperialism.” She wanted us to collaborate in assembling a casebook – the first in the United States legal education market, we believed – on “economic justice.”
The target of our imperialism was a bifurcation within legal education. Emma and I, at Georgetown and Berkeley respectively, saw two distinct groups of students in our classes. Social justice students took courses on critical race theory, constitutional equal protection, and civil rights, while business-minded students focused courses related to economics, like securities regulation, international trade law, business associations, tax, and banking.
One effect of this divide was that our politically progressive students tended to have little understanding of how markets and market-related institutions work. Instead, they found themselves limited to a moral language under which, for example, corporations could be denounced as “evil” but corporate power and its workings remained opaque. A second, more subtle effect of this divide was to impoverish our teaching about structural inequality. The infamous “public-private split” in legal doctrine reinforces the popular belief that market power represents freedom while government embodies coercion. A similar split, insidious in a different way, limits anti-discrimination law to individual and interpersonal relations: the “intent requirement” in constitutional and statutory law protects institutional and structural subordination. At the same time, business law courses and “law and economics” seminars seldom engage with race, gender, or other forms of subordination – save for a day or two on “corporate social responsibility.” Our imperial project, then, sought to pull down the walls, disrupting both the citadel of law and economics and the cloister of critical race theory.
Though we didn’t succeed at building an empire with our book, we did develop an approach to teaching law and political economy that LPE teachers and scholars can use today. In a series of four posts, I’ll outline that approach using Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri, a class action filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri in 2015. In my Economic Justice classes, I use the case to teach students about ways in which structural inequality in the United States is produced by both racial domination and capitalist exploitation, and what this inequality looks like in the age of “neoliberalism.” I also use it to teach students about how legal doctrine shields this structural inequality from effective challenge, giving them a perspective on the intellectual apartheid of legal doctrine and legal education. In this first post, I explain how I use the complaint in Fant to frame a discussion of law, political economy, and the “slow violence” of the criminal justice system. Subsequent posts will discuss how I use the case to teach students to connect racial and economic inequality to the concepts of neoliberalism, legal geographies, and municipal finance. Each post presents a different way to advance the LPE project in the classroom. Continue reading →
