Islands of Empowerment: Anti-Discrimination Law and the Question of Racial Emancipation (original) (raw)

"Fictional Visions": Autobiographical Reflections on Re-Reading the Alchemy of Race and Rights

(2013) 31:2 Windsor Yearbook of Access To Justice 93

This personal narrative reflects on the author’s engagement with Patricia Williams’ The Alchemy of Race and Rights over a period of 15 years encompassing law school, private practice and activist and academic work. In charting the trajectory of the author’s development as a critical legal scholar, the piece highlights the enduring contribution of Williams’ work for those working and writing at the intersections of rights, contentious politics and the law.

Legal Education and the Legitimation of Racial Power

2015

Thank you for your invitation to talk with you today about how the recent uproar about police killings of African-Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country might connect to your experience in elite legal education— what might Harvard Law School have to do with what is going on? I will talk about the way that racial justice is ordinarily understood in law schools, and the shortcomings of that dominant conception. My thesis is that Harvard Law School is one of those mainstream institutions of power in America that defends a universalist rule-of-law ideology as a way to comprehend racial justice, and a bankrupt ideology of “meritocracy” to justify the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige in American society. Deans Minow of Harvard and Post of Yale recently published an op-ed in THE BOSTON GLOBE making explicit the connection between the events after Ferguson and law school’s rule-of-law mission:

Race, Law & Inequality, Fifty Years after the Civil Rights Era

2017

Over the last several decades, law and social science scholars have documented persistent racial inequality in the United States. This review focuses on mechanisms to explain this persistent pattern. We begin with policy making, a mechanism fundamental to all the others. We then examine one particularly important policy, the carceral state, which can be described as the most important policy response to the Civil Rights Era. A significant body of scholarship on employment discrimination presents a site for explaining the transformation of law on the books into the law in action. Finally, we review scholarship on the persistence of segregation, concentrated neighborhood disadvantage and its attendant impact on racial inequality. We conclude with two themes that deserve special emphasis, the need for theory drawing these fields together, and our need, above all at this moment in our history, for public scholarship changing the discourse, politics, and law perpetuating racial inequality.

Race, Law, and Inequality, Fifty Years After the Civil Rights Era

Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Over the last several decades, law and social science scholars have documented persistent racial inequality in the United States. This review focuses on mechanisms to explain this persistent pattern. We begin with policy making, a mechanism fundamental to all the others. We then examine one particularly important policy, the carceral state, which can be described as the most important policy response to the civil rights era. A significant body of scholarship on employment discrimination presents a site for explaining the transformation of law on the books into the law in action. Finally, we review scholarship on the persistence of segregation and concentrated neighborhood disadvantage and their attendant impact on racial inequality. We conclude with two themes that deserve special emphasis: the need for theory drawing these fields together and our need, above all at this moment in our history, for public scholarship changing the discourse, politics, and law perpetuating racial inequ...

Race, Law, and Inequality, 50 Years After the Civil Rights Era

Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2017

Over the last several decades, law and social science scholars have documented persistent racial inequality in the United States. This review focuses on mechanisms to explain this persistent pattern. We begin with policy making, a mechanism fundamental to all the others. We then examine one particularly important policy, the carceral state, which can be described as the most important policy response to the civil rights era. A significant body of scholarship on employment discrimination presents a site for explaining the transformation of law on the books into the law in action. Finally, we review scholarship on the persistence of segregation and concentrated neighborhood disadvantage and their attendant impact on racial inequality. We conclude with two themes that deserve special emphasis: the need for theory drawing these fields together and our need, above all at this moment in our history, for public scholarship changing the discourse, politics, and law perpetuating racial inequality.