Mired in Multivalence: Municipal Liability and the Post-1960s City

• In Event: 20467 - Social Movements and Institutions in US Politics

Abstract

In the 1960s, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented wave of urban uprisings, which were led by Black residents to protest their social, economic, and political subjugation. In the aftermath of the uprisings, federal government leaders, legal practitioners, and insurance companies debated how to pay for uprising-related damages, with a popular proposal calling for cities to be held financially liable. To what extent was municipal liability used to pursue uprising-related damages and how did this legal doctrine reframe the roles and responsibilities of cities? In this paper, I develop a corpus of judicial opinions from all federal and state cases on municipal liability that were arbitrated between 1901 and 2020, and I use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models to analyze linguistic and semantic shifts in these opinions. I find that during the 1960s, municipal liability was drastically reinterpreted, from being a legal doctrine that was originally developed to deter White mob violence and provide compensation to Black victims, to being a legal doctrine for deterring Black-led uprisings and providing compensation to mostly White property and business owners. Moreover, I find municipality liability cases since the 1960s have become increasingly multivalent, with plaintiffs asserting distinct and competing claims in terms of rights and judges proposing different interpretations of “protection.” These findings suggest that the 1960s urban uprisings had a consequential role in expanding the use of municipal liability in American law and that this intervention contributed to contradictory notions of cities in terms of their duties and responsibilities to residents.

Author

• Tina Law, University of California, Davis