Policy Practicum: Repairing the State and Local Relationship in a Red State / Blue City Context (809N): Policy Client: Mississippi State Conference NAACP (Charles Taylor and Frank Figgers). As anyone in Jackson, Mississippi will tell you, the city has a terrible relationship with its state government. Chronic mistrust flows in both directions, and for at least the past 25 years, state/local acrimony has been both a cause and symptom of state actions to withdraw authority and funds from Jackson. Current measures to intervene in the governance of Jackson's infrastructure and take over the city's downtown police and courts system mark new escalation in state/city tensions. So far, these deepening tensions have been answered with the typical modes of conflict: adversarial litigation and polarized politics. But those interventions have only power and blame at stake, without fostering cooperative solutions to the city's immense challenges. Jackson has serious, urgent human needs: an old, failing water system that would need heroic reinvestment even without the extreme flood and freeze events now made more common by climate change; a devastating violent crime and homicide rate; a poverty rate above 25% (among the highest rates in the country); a population more than 26% smaller than it was in 1980 (and all the blight associated with such a fall); and more. Challenges that significant (especially in a state facing disinvestment and poverty from border to border) will mean that neither the city nor the state can act effectively alone. But after so many years of antipathy, state and local cooperation will require nothing less than a restorative process. As one small start toward that longer work, this policy lab will work to understand the origins and consequences of Mississippi and Jackson's legal and political relationship. Mediation, after all, requires mutual understanding the setting of baseline facts. Our group will confront the question "how did Jackson and Mississippi reach this crossroads?" from the following angles: (1) Mississippi's constitutional history, (2) the history of other state laws governing municipal power, (3) the history of public corruption cases against both state and local officials, (4) major real estate deals involving state actors within city limits, (5) a recent history of state interventions in valuable local enterprises (including the Jackson Airport and Two Mississippi Museums complex), (5) the recent history of infrastructure and other federal block grant allocation to Jackson, and (6) the history of the battle for voting rights and basic individual civil rights within Jackson. Each student in the lab will take on an independent lane of legal/political research from the list above and write up their findings in sole-authored memos that are organized both topically and chronologically. We will then share and integrate our findings across memos, fusing them in the final two weeks of the lab into a single chronological report documenting the state and local relationship. We will share this final work product with civil rights leaders in Jackson to factcheck and "ground-truth" this research, identifying next steps for sharing, factchecking, and publishing this information with state leaders in future quarters. While this policy lab will be specialized to Jackson's situation, we will take opportunities (at the start of the quarter and at the end) to read and discuss how it relates to broader red state/blue city conflicts in other Southern states. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.