Jonathon Booth

@jboothhistory

Associate Professor of Law, CU Boulder Current projects: Police Takeovers Legalizing the Counterrevolution of Property Studying Policing from a Law and Political Economy Perspective jonathonbooth.com

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Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· 28d

This is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but why would you ever make an ebook look like this. It's so annoying!

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· 29d

Recalling June 2023 in New York. (Final picture is a clear day)

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 15

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 14

Another $8,000-12,000 opportunity. Do you think they'd accept a paper about Trump v. IRS?

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 13

Nothing good can come of this

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 10

So 2026 to put a bunch of rhetoric in this. Better to just do the Nixon.

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 9

I've got a new article for the August cycle called Police Takeovers. It centers on the long history of state controlled policing in St. Louis, where the state retook control over the police force last year. It argues that such takeovers are a new and more aggressive version of hyper preemption.

Abstract for Police Takeovers by Jonathon Booth

In 2025, after a dozen years of local control, Missouri took control of the St. Louis Police Department. This was the first time any state had taken permanent control of a municipal police force in nearly a century. The institutional takeover of the St. Louis police is similar to other measures by which Republican-led states have eliminated policies enacted by Democrat-led cities – a phenomenon scholars have labeled “hyper preemption” and which in recent years has targeted criminal justice policies. This Article argues, however, that the takeover in St. Louis is different in kind from most preemption legislation because the state has replaced the personnel selected by the city’s leaders, directly undermining the home rule right to local self-government. It is likely that states will continue to take increasingly aggressive actions, including institutional takeovers, to forestall local reforms to the criminal justice system.

St. Louis is now one of only two police forces in the country permanently controlled by the state, but state control used to be much more common. In the late nineteenth century, many states experimented with state control of municipal police forces, but almost all of those experiments were quickly abandoned as failures. State control did not solve the problems of police corruption and political influence that justified it but instead conflicted with the increasingly popular ideology of municipal home rule. This Article provides the first analysis in more than a century of the historical phenomenon of state control of municipal police. It then explores the history of state control of police in St. Louis from 1861 to the present to reveal the shared motivations of state control of police and hyper preemption and to illustrate the historical failures of state control. It finally proposes a litigation strategy that aims to fight institutional takeovers by distinguishing them from preemption

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 9

Troy Jackson just texted me asking for money

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 4

he really goes hard

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 4

William Lloyd Garrison on the Declaration (shortly before burning the Constitution)

Jonathon Booth@jboothhistory· Jul 4

I actually can totally imagine Kash Patel seizing a ton of documents, putting them in storage, and then forgetting about them because he got too drunk on the plane to his girlfriend's concert