Responding to the (Dual) Policing Crisis in Ferguson

The police shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 set off a policing crisis that reverberated across the world. The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (DOJ) intervened in this crisis, initiating a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. This investigation resulted in a transformative Findings Report and federal consent decree. To fully assess the impact of DOJ’s intervention, it is helpful to conceptualize America’s policing crisis as a dual crisis: one acute, the other chronic. When assessing DOJ’s intervention in Ferguson through this lens, readers can see that DOJ’s work is an important, albeit partial, response to the chronic crisis and has only an ancillary impact on the acute crisis.

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.