Legal Education and the Legitimation of Racial Power (original) (raw)
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:
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