Place, Race, and Power
Brian Highsmith
UCLA School of Law
This seminar considers how place structures power in the American political economy. We will focus, in particular, on the consequences of our (comparatively unique) institutional design: exploring how the law mediates the relationships between economic geography and structural corporate power, processes of social categorization, and the terms of democratic citizenship.
The first part of the seminar considers how law helps determine where people reside and where mobile capital locates; the remainder explores how and why “place” matters for economic opportunity and political representation. Our readings will focus on the legal, political, and historical context that shape a wide variety of economic and political outcomes. We will draw from these readings to gain insight into the hidden stakes of geography — as shaped by the laws that govern contestation over local jurisdictional boundaries, and the institutional arrangements that give those boundaries meaning — and apply the resulting insights to contemporary policy problems.