FERGUSON, Mo. -- Nearly a half-century ago, a University of Missouri law professor named T.E. Lauer issued a warning. Missouris network of municipal courts , he wrote , were a modern anomaly generally overlooked or ignored as the misshapen stepchildren of our judicial system.

It was disgraceful, he argued, that poor people accused of municipal ordinance violations didnt receive lawyers. Arresting and confining citizens for petty violations of municipal codes was unnecessary. Many municipalities, he wrote, had clearly conceived of their municipal courts in terms of their revenue-raising ability, and those financial incentives influenced judges' decisions. He questioned whether the term kangaroo court would too often validly apply to municipal court proceedings.

That was 1966. The Civil Rights Act was two years old. Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive, and Barack Obama had just turned 5. Dozens of young girls in St. Louis were treated for minor injuries sustained at a Beatles concert . George Wallace, who had tried to prevent black students from enrolling at a public university after promising segregation forever, was governor of Alabama.

In the ensuing decades, those kangaroo courts enabled small towns, especially in St. Louis County , to pad their budgets by extracting fines from people for extraordinarily minor violations of municipal codes -- under threat of jail. Arrest warrants were issued for thousands of people, for supposed crimes like wearing baggy pants , missing a special sticker on their car, or failing to subscribe to a designated trash service. Residents who had to endure these local courts described them as out of control, inhumane, "crazy, racist, unprofessional and sickening.

The decades between Lauer's warning and 2014 brought no significant reforms to Missouri's municipal courts. Then, on Aug. 9, a Ferguson police officer's bullet that killed 18-year-old Michael Brown brought an end to the inaction.