There’s yet one more way I try to get students to see the mutually entangled systems of capitalism and racism presented by Fant v. Ferguson. Why did Ferguson and other northern St Louis suburbs end up depending on their criminal justice systems for the revenues necessary to run a city?
A third vantage point from which to consider Fant v Ferguson is legal geography: the way that racism and capitalism over time shape create and maintain physical spaces through processes of investment and disinvestment, development and underdevelopment, displacement and settlement. A key way into this story – as Audrey MacFarlane notes – is through the history of racial segregation in housing markets.
In my first post on Fant v. Ferguson, I introduced the case as a story about our racialized criminal justice system. The criminal justice story, however, represents only one layer of the onion. Like its fast counterpart, the slow violence experienced by Keilee Fant is embedded in a larger system of structural economic inequality that we call “poverty.”
In a series of four posts, I’ll outline an approach to teaching law and political economy using Keilee Fant v. City of Ferguson, Missouri, a class action filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri in 2015. 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.
In their first post on this blog, Amy, David, and Jed assert that “politics and the economy cannot be separated.” Nevertheless, as they also observe, the separation of the two – as, for example, in the idea that economic activity is determined by laws of supply and demand that lie outside the power of governments…
In September of 2017, I attended the First International Conference of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Subtitled “Economics for a New Progressive Era,” the conference displaced the university’s annual Post-Keynesian Conference, signaling a growing enthusiasm for MMT among academics, advocates, students, and regular people. Reporters from Bloomberg and the…
