Black Metropolis Research Consortium
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Land Titling and Litigation
No full textWe study a land-titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to right holders. Ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes did not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this increase in litigation reflects the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low-value parcels that, under the customary system, were optimal to keep unclarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the increase in litigation took place among households that plausibly own land of lower value
Productivity, Prices, and Concentration in Manufacturing: A Demsetzian Perspective
No full textConcentration and price-cost margins have increased since the 1980s in many industries. These developments have raised concern about weakened competition and resulting harm to consumers and the need for tougher antitrust enforcement. In 1973 Harold Demsetz cautioned against inferring weakened competition from high or rising margins and concentration. He argued that this correlation between margins and concentration could arise from productivity differences across competitive firms. This paper studies the interplay between concentration, prices, and productivity across US manufacturing industries over two 15-year periods from 1982 to 2012. The consistent pattern is that high and rising concentration has been associated with better productivity growth. I show that widening margins, whether related to concentration or not, are mainly driven by productivity gains rather than prices, as in the competitive process outlined by Demsetz. Skepticism about tougher antitrust policy may be warranted: this would risk harm to productivity without benefiting consumers
Symposium Introduction: This Violent City? Urban Violence in Chicago and Beyond
Get PDFTo many, the city of Chicago conjures up a specter of unremitting urban violence. In 2014, the city was labeled the “murder capital” of the United States.1 The following year, a video of the police shooting Laquan McDonald became a cynosure of public concern.2 Commentators as disparate as Spike Lee and President Donald Trump agree: Chicago is uniquely bloody.3 Predictably, the empirical data about Chicago’s crime and policing trends belie the most dramatic of these claims.4 Yet if Chicago is not as violent as either Lee or Trump makes it out to be, the city’s experience nonetheless provides a fruitful lens through which to consider the causes, dynamics, and optics of urban violence and the array of potential legal and policy responses. Our home city’s centrality to traditions of urban sociology, its rich tapestries of racial and ethnic diversity, the durability of its residential segregation and economic stratification, and its role in both police reform and retrenchment—all these provide fertile ground for seeding discussion about the legal and policy problematics of urban violence.
This Symposium gathers a diverse range of empirical, theoretical, and legal perspectives on these problematics as illuminated by the case of Chicago. Scholars from the legal academy and the social sciences take up divergent questions through this lens in the pages that follow. Their contributions touch on both the causes of violence and potential responses. The Symposium thus confronts the following sorts of questions: Why does urban violence, of various forms, arise and persist? How does the frequency and distribution of such violence relate to larger socioeconomic dynamics of urban violence in contexts of concentrated and intractable poverty? What have we learned from decades of massive investments in policing and incarceration, as opposed to noncarceral policy instruments? What are the costs, particularly to historically marginalized groups, of the decision to use coercive rather than supportive interventions? How do various forms of violence—informal and state—interact with each other? And how have initiatives from within communities changed the patterns or stakes of violence?
In two respects, we (as conveners of the Symposium) aim to initiate a debate that is broader than the discussions of urban violence commonly found in the popular press and the academy. To begin with, we frame the problem of urban violence to include both (typically criminal) private violence and (typically lawful) state coercion used by the police and others—phenomena that may be linked.5 As a historical matter, deaths from police violence once comprised nearly 6% of homicides in Chicago.6 Police violence obviously remains a flash point for public controversy today.7 It is hard to see how an analysis of urban violence can account for both the costs and benefits of policy choices—and, in particular, the election between carceral and noncarceral tools—while losing sight of police violence. Second, as just suggested, we resist the assumption that coercive interventions exhaust the plausible domain of responses to urban violence. There is ample evidence, including important work by some of the participants in this Symposium, that violence rates respond to noncoercive policy levers.8 An examination of urban violence that assumes away the relevance of noncoercive interventions is necessarily incomplete.
Our modest goal in this Introduction is to assemble some baseline empirics concerning both private violence and state coercion to provide a context for the pieces that follow. In so doing, we aim to mitigate the need for “scene setting” by each paper in the Symposium.
Readers of the Symposium will find here a synoptic guide to some basic facts about the distribution and extent of criminal violence, as well as socioeconomic conditions and police activity, in Chicago. We include, too, several intercity comparisons to facilitate exploration of whether Chicago presents uniquely dystopic dynamics. To the extent feasible, we rely on graphical representations of the data that are easily and quickly grasped. Our aim here is not to tender any single substantive claim but rather to provide some common ground for the analytic pieces that follow. We conclude by canvassing briefly the contributions made by specific pieces in the Symposiu
Racially Territorial Policing in Black Neighborhoods
Get PDFThis Essay explores police practices that marginalize Black people by limiting their freedom of movement across the spaces of Black neighborhoods. In an earlier article, I theorized “racial territoriality” as a form of discrimination that “excludes people of color from—or marginalizes them within—racialized White spaces that have a racially exclusive history, practice, and/or reputation.” In this Essay, I consider how my theory of racial territoriality could apply to policing. It offers an ac-count of how police not only criminalize Black people but also criminalize Black spaces, ostensibly justifying them—and the people who live in or frequent them—as “natural” targets for police activity. As an example of racially territorial policing, the Essay discusses the Supreme Court’s decision in Illinois v. Wardlow and the costs that it imposes by granting police significant discretion to stop people in areas that they define—often inaccurately, according to some research—as having high levels of crime
An Abolitionist Critique of Violence
Get PDFThe violence experienced by young people of color in the city is multidimensional—both interpersonal and structural. So many of the young have to swallow their rage as they are surveilled in stores and on the streets, as they are targeted by cops for endless stops and frisks, as they are denied jobs, as their schools are closed, and as they are locked in cages by the thousands. For some, the violations and the deprivation turn outward. The instrumental use of violence by some young people becomes a rational adaptive strategy in response to racial and economic oppression. For some of the young people I’ve worked with, the specter of death is a constant companion. A young man who has been behind bars for most of his formative years has told me on more than one occasion that he was always certain his life only held two vi-able possibilities: “die in the streets or die in prison