Critical Race Theory and the Law

Catalog description

There has been an unprecedented assault on Critical Race Theory (CRT) in recent years. An approach to law that was birthed by legal scholars of color in the 1980s, CRT has offered both a critical assessment of the legal victories of the civil rights movement, and an analysis of the role of law in the struggle against structural racism. CRT has exposed the ways in which liberal legalism can reproduce racial injustice, while also creatively strategizing about working in the terrain of law and legal struggles to challenge white supremacy. In September 2020 Donald Trump denounced CRT and suddenly CRT caught the national spotlight, provoking front page editorials and prime time segments on legal scholarship. More ominously, a series of state legislatures and school boards have banned its teaching in efforts that have sought to chill critical analysis of race, racism and structural injustice in classrooms across the nation. In this course we will get an introduction to this tradition of legal analysis in different areas of law such as voting rights, employment discrimination, housing rights, voting rights, affirmative action and criminal law. On the one hand, CRT has argued that racism is knit into the fabric of American jurisprudence, including its celebrated constitutional promises; on the other, CRT has consistently contributed to American jurisprudence in pursuing legal strategies to fight racial injustice. As Patricia Williams has famously argued, “To say the blacks never fully believed in rights is true. Yet it is also true that blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before.” This course will explore this paradoxical positionality and vexed terrain of struggle against racial injustice in America. In addition to landmark cases, we will read some of the principle contributors to CRT such as Derrick Bell, Cheryl Harris,…