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TEN YEARS AND TEN MILES: REFLECTING ON FERGUSON
Benjamin Levin*
On August 9, 2014, Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson
shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown.' Three months later, a St.
Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson. The activism, protests,
and uprisings that followed helped to catalyze movements to confront racial
injustice in U.S. criminal policy. In the days, weeks, months, and years that
followed, Ferguson came to operate as a sort of shorthand or stand in for
police violence, for racial inequality, for structural racism, for extractive
models of policing, and for a host of other problems, defined and
undefined.2
On August 9, 2014, I had never been to Ferguson, to St. Louis, or to
Missouri. Weeks away from my first semester as a teaching fellow at
Harvard Law School, I was preparing my first-year Legal Research and
Writing course. I was only a few years out of law school myself, but I hoped
to pursue a career as a law professor, teaching and writing about U.S.
criminal policy. That meant cutting my teeth teaching a required skills
course that focused on the conventions of legal writing, the right way to
structure legal argument, and the best tactics for legal research-tasks that
are undoubtedly important for lawyers, but often felt worlds away from the
* Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis. As a reflection on the past decade,
this Essay owes an immense debt of gratitude to the colleagues, friends, and students who have shaped
my thinking over this time. Many thanks to Avrye King and Charlotte Morse for many discussions on
this Essay and on this Volume and for all their hard work to make sure that this Volume came to be.
Charlotte Morse also leant invaluable research assistance for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks to all
of the authors whose work is featured in this Volume for taking the time to share their perspectives on
Ferguson and to the editors of the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy for taking the time
to shepherd the essays in this Volume through the publication process.
1. See Larry Buchanan et al., What Happened in Ferguson?, N.Y. TIMES,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-
shooting.html [https://perma.cc/78JT-DNJD] (updated Aug. 10, 2015).
2. See S. David Mitchell, Ferguson: Footnote or Transformative Event?, 80 Mo. L. REV. 943,
944 (2015) ('Ferguson.' No longer does this name simply represent the geographical boundaries of a
city in St. Louis County formed initially by white flight from St. Louis City and that has become
increasingly African American over time. It has come to represent so much more. (footnotes omitted)).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wajlp78&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)