Have Ferguson and Its Companions Contaminated Black Support for Legal Institutions?

Abstract

Given that African Americans have been victimized by the abuses of individual police officers as well as by discriminatory public policies such as “stop-and-frisk,” it is no surprise that considerable alienation seems to characterize the contemporary relationship between African Americans and the legal institutions that govern them. But have those attitudes poisoned more general views of legal institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court? Using a nationally-representative sample of African Americans, we assess whether blacks generalize from their experiences with local authorities to perceptions of legal system fairness, and further to institutional support for the high bench. While we find that perceptions of legal system fairness have not undermined Supreme Court legitimacy, all of the relationships we consider are found to be conditional upon the nature of group attachments.