Brooks Explores Race, Class, and Legal System

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Richard Brooks

Research has shown that African-Americans are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death and executed. But law professor Richard Brooks has unexpectedly found that historically a person is 15% more likely to receive the death penalty in a judge’s election year.

“This finding is really robust,” explained Brooks, a new IPR faculty fellow and assistant professor of law at Northwestern. He believes his results make a persuasive case that decisions about life and death are responsive to politics.

Brooks’ finding is contained in a new paper with Steven Rafael at UC-Berkeley entitled “Life terms or death sentences: The uneasy relationship between judicial elections and capital punishment” forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. It is based on 1870-1930 data on Chicago murders gathered by law school colleague Leigh Bienen, who is collecting new data through 1960. Brooks is even more interested in post-1960 data that would track all Chicago murders, disposition of those cases, and the judges that hear them.

This work is one aspect of Brooks’s research on race, class, and perceptions of the American legal system. He is working on a book that focuses on African-American participation in the legal system, particularly their perceptions of fairness. A key findings so far is that better-off African Americans are more distrustful of the legal system than poor blacks, a situation he attributes to “relative deprivation.”

His argument is based in part on the social and spatial mobility of wealthier African Americans who often move into integrated settings where their higher visibility may subject them to racial profiling. But this is only part of the story. Brooks also maintains that better-off blacks, often in the minority in their communities, tend to identify more with their racial group, who in comparison are less fortunate than they.

Brooks is coediting the book with George Washington University sociologists Ronald Weitzer and Steven Tuch.

In 1998, Brooks earned both his PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and his JD from the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, he studied with Nobel Prize winner and economist Ronald Coase, who steered Brooks into his second major line of research on organizational and institutional responses to laws and legal rules.

Part of this work concerns the way in which economic agents such as auto manufacturers, coal and oil suppliers, and electric power utilities organize themselves in response to changes in laws and regulations. A paper on the oil shipping industry, appeared in the Journal of Law and Economics in 2002.

Brooks continues to study the role of the black church in urban community development, especially in providing housing, reducing crime and developing businesses in poor neighborhoods. He is concerned that rushing into federal programs that support faith-based initiatives without proper attention to the churches’ institutional norms and cultural history may be counterproductive and interfere with the commitment and incentives that motivated their efforts in the past.

Brooks also is examining how racial housing covenants have affected individual behavior, both before and after such covenants were ruled unconstitutional. Though covenants are no longer legal, they may be still operating as a convention that effectively promotes racial segregation in housing.