Michelle Wilde Anderson, Centering the State in Stategraft: Reforming Abusive Local Governments Requires State Law Reform, 2024 Wis. L. Rev. 621 (2024).
Ten years have passed since Darren Wilson, an officer of the Ferguson
police department in Missouri, killed teenager Michael Brown. The street
uprising that followed led to a generation of investigative journalism, federal
inquests, civil rights litigation, and legal and policy scholarship that
documented local governments engaged in illegal, racially discriminatory
revenue collection practices. Today, nearly every state has advocates pushing
to reform local systems that stack fines and fees on cities’ poorest residents.
From the political right as well as the political left, these advocates demand
a version of local government that does not fund its operations by making its
most vulnerable residents even worse off. Bernadette Atuahene has long been
among the scholars driving this work. She forcefully critiques exploitative
practices by local governments in “A Theory of Stategraft.”
Atuahene is right in her unsparing assessment. But the rightness of her
argument should not deflect from the degree to which state governments also
drive stategraft. State regulation, funding, and delegation of authority to local
governments are background causes of abusive local systems. This Essay
pulls up alongside Atuahene’s article to argue that any answer to “stategraft”
will have to force states to the table of reform. Using Missouri and Michigan
as examples, this Essay highlights some of the state background rules that are
responsible for the impossible fiscal bind that local governments face in
providing basic services to high-poverty cities. A quick look at a lawsuit in
Louisiana demonstrates how states can and must share the costs of the
concentrated poverty that state policy has helped to build.