Law, Race, and Design:
Examining the St. Louis Story
A Bear Bridges InterDisciplinary Course
John Inazu
School of LAW and John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Penina Laker
Sam Fox School of DESIGN and Visual ARTS
Teaching Assistants: Elizabeth Privat (School of Law, ‘2021) and Eve Wallack (Sam Fox School, ‘2020)
This 3-credit undergraduate course meets Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30 - 3:50 pm.
Description
This interdisciplinary course focuses on the intersection of law, race, and design in St. Louis. From Dred Scott to Ferguson, St. Louis has served as a focal point for some of the most important issues in our country’s long and still unfinished work toward racial equality. The law has played an important role in these developments – judicial opinions, city ordinances, and commission reports have shaped how we understand questions of race and equality. But the law is not simply the written word – it involves people, practices, and places, and the stories we tell about them. How we communicate our stories ultimately affects how we understand those stories, and how we understand ourselves. This course situates law within stories and equips students to communicate those stories in ways that draw from a range of communication design methodological tools. Using design research, thinking, and a human-centered design approach, it challenges students to connect the words of legal documents with the experiences of those whose lives are situated by them.
Objectives [WORK ON THESE]
Methodological
Understand, appreciate, and craft arguments from different perspectives
Identify both strengths and weaknesses of different arguments and opposing viewpoints
Make principled distinctions and defend them
Learn how to ask good questions
Recognize the value of interdisciplinary approaches to contested issues
Write clearly, cogently, and provocatively
Provide lucid and helpful feedback to one another
Substantive
Gain an appreciation for the tensions and synergies between law and design
Understand some of the key issues related to law, race, and design in St. Louis and in the United States
Texts
Students will need to acquire Ferguson’s Fault Lines: The Race Quake the Rocked a Nation (Kimberly Norwood, ed.). Additional readings will be provided in class.
Assignments and Course Grade
Your course grade will be based on a composite of individual (I) and group (G) grades. You will be placed in design groups of 4-5 students each, and each member of your group will receive the same group grade.
Reflection Papers (I) 25%
Individual Presentations (I) 10%
Creative Brief (G) 5%
Final Presentation (G) 15%
Final Design Project (G) 20%
Design Project Documentation (G) 10%
Design Group Peer Assessments (I) 10%
Class Participation (I) 5%
The Design Project will be a hands-on collaborative effort in which students will apply elemental design thinking principles to create an artifact that re-imagines the way we read a law case. The final deliverable should take into account the ease of user-interaction and comprehension for a wider audience—it may be designed using physical and/or digital media. Students will be assigned into groups of 4-5. Each group will be given one of the primary cases from the course and be tasked with “filling in the gaps” (narrative, visually, and otherwise) with the goal of producing a web-based educational tool for a general audience.
Attendance and Classroom Policies
Your attendance and contribution to the discussion are crucial to making this class successful and a necessary part of engaging with the complex ideas that we’ll encounter. We recognize that many of you will have occasional foreseen and unforeseen conflicts, and we will accommodate those at the margins. But you should not take this course if you think you’ll miss a significant number of classes. If you anticipate missing a class, you should notify us at least 24 hours in advance of our meeting.
Communication
We will make every effort to respond to your emails within one day of your having sent them, with the exception of emails sent over the weekend or holidays, which we will answer by the following business day.
You can schedule office hours with Professor Inazu through this link. His office is AB 537 in the law school. You can schedule office hours with Professor Laker by emailing her.
You should feel free to use office hours not only to discuss our substantive readings but also to obtain help on your writing, to ask questions about graduate school or law school, or to talk about other academic or career interests.
We have posted some basic writing guidelines and stylistic preferences. You should familiarize yourself with those guidelines, and we will expect you to follow them for all writing in this course. We also commend to you the additional resources listed on that page.
Course Schedule
Before Semester Begins
Abdullah v. County of St. Louis (E.D. MO, 2014)
Assignment: 1-2 page reflection paper (due January 10)
January 13: Introduction to the Course
No assigned reading
January 15: Introduction to Design
No assigned reading
January 20: Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday (NO CLASS)
January 22: Introduction to Human-Centered Design (HCD)
Excerpt from Whitney Quesenbery, “Storytelling from User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design”
Possible Guest Speaker: Dannie Boyd
January 27: Equal Protection Under the Law
Readings TBD
January 29: St. Louis as Place
Shelley v. Kramer (1948)
Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968)
February 3: Law as Story
No assigned readings
February 5: Working Session
No assigned readings
February 10: Segregation by Design
Colin Gordon, “Making Ferguson: Segregation and Uneven Development in St. Louis and St. Louis County” in Ferguson’s Fault Lines
Possible Guest Speaker: Audrey Weston, Sam Fox School (Class of 2020)
February 12: Exploring St. Louis, Part I
Readings TBD (Stanford guidebook?)
Class field trip
Possible Guest Speaker: Professor Heidi Kolk, Sam Fox School
February 13-16: Exploring St. Louis, Part II
Review presentation grading sheet
Individual field trips
Assignment: 2-minute presentations (due February 19)
February 17: Working Session
With teaching assistants only
Prepare 2-minute presentations
February 19: Presentations
2-minute presentations and feedback
February 24: Introduction to Systems Design Thinking
Readings TBD
February 26: Education in St. Louis
Kimberly Norwood, “From Brown to Brown: Sixty-Plus Years of Separately Unequal Public Education” in Ferguson’s Fault Lines
Possible Guest Speaker: Professor Kimberly Norwood, School of Law
March 2: Applying Systems Design Thinking
No assigned readings
March 4: Design and Law
Readings TBD
Possible Guest Speaker: Professor Jonathan Smith, School of Law
Assign cases for design project (one per group):
Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938)
Rollins v. Shannon, 292 F.Supp. 580 (E.D. MO, 1968)
Fant v. Ferguson, 2016 WL 6696065 (E.D., MO, 2016)
March 9-13: Spring Break (NO CLASS)
March 16: Explaining the Design Project
March 18: Working Session
No assigned readings
Assignment: creative brief (due March 25)
March 23: Policing in St. Louis
Department of Justice Report on Ferguson
Indictment of Boone, Hays, Myers, and Colletta (Nov. 29, 2018)
Possible Guest Speaker: Professor Trevor Gardner, School of Law
March 25: Prosecuting in St. Louis
Thomas Harvey and Brendan Roediger, “St. Louis County Municipal Courts, For-Profit Policing, and the Road to Reforms” in Ferguson’s Fault Lines
[something from Stanford Legal Design Lab?]
Possible Guest Speaker: Professor Kathryn Banks, School of Law
March 30: Preparing for Courtroom Visit and Human Observations
[reading on introduction to ethnographic research strategies in a design context]
March 31 - April 3: Courtroom Visits
In groups of 2-3
Assignment: 2-3 page written reflection on visit (due April 6)
April 6: Communicating For Change
Readings TBD [Mobility for All?]
April 8: Working Session
Presentation of initial round of ideas for design project: physical artifact
April 13: Protests: Law and Design
John Inazu, “Unlawful Assembly as Social Control” (selections) [maybe]
[something from De Nichols]
Possible Guest Speaker: De Nichols
April 15: Revisiting Abdullah (Ferguson Protest Case)
Abdullah v. County of St. Louis (E.D. MO, 2014)
Check in on design project
April 20: Design Presentations (first two groups)
20-minute presentations plus 20 minutes each for Q&A
April 22: Design Presentations (last group) and class wrap-up
20-minute presentations plus 20 minutes each for Q&A
What it means to document your work
Exam Period: Submit Final Design Project