Critical Race Theory: What Is It? What Does It Do? Why Should It Matter?

Catalog description

It is almost a truism that the United States is the world's most litigious society. As a polity founded on an almost sacralized constitutional foundation, it is no surprise that law and the legal system are quite central to life, its conceptions, and its manifestations, as understood and led by most inhabitants of the country. This, in turn, engenders a faith in law and its attendant justice on the part of Americans. This faith encompasses certain attitudes on the part of different segments of the American populace towards legal discourse, the operation of the legal system, the justice promised by law, and so forth. In this class, we shall be exploring these diverse issues from the standpoint of Critical Race Theory. We seek to establish what CRT is and its genesis; what it does and how it does what it does, and what justification we might have or can provide for studying it. At the end of the class, participants should have a fairly robust idea of CRT, its fundamental claims, its applicability, and what insights it provides regarding the nature, function, and aims of law and the legal system in the United States of America.