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Race, Racism, and American Law: Leading Cases and Materials, 2023

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Authors
  • Derrick A. Bell
  • Cheryl I. Harris
  • Justin Hansford
  • Amna A. Akbar
  • Atiba Ellis
  • Audrey G. McFarlane
Series / Supplements
BOOKMARK
Book length
1068 pages
Publication Date
2023-01-10
Edition
Teaching Materials
NO
Description

Intended for use with the authors’ forthcoming casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law, Seventh Edition (forthcoming 2025), Race, Racism, and American Law: Leading Cases and Materials includes significant historical and contemporary cases and materials edited with an aim to foreground the most relevant sections and passages to illustrate the crucial role of race in the formation of US law. This new edition of Derrick Bell’s groundbreaking textbook Race, Racism, and American Law, like prior versions, eschews a traditional casebook format. The locus of analysis in this text is the struggle for racial justice, and its underlying history and political context as reflected in the ongoing contestation over law, legal reform, and transformation. As such the supplement includes but is not limited to Supreme Court cases. We follow Bell’s model of locating all edited cases and materials in the supplement, reserving the book’s text to provide historical and political context for significant cases or legislative actions, along with hypothetical questions, comments, and other tools of analysis.

Professors and students will benefit from:

  • Both legal and non-legal primary source material.Leading Cases and Materials includes selected historical and contemporary cases, legislation, and other legal materials that foreground the crucial role of race and racism, and the struggle for racial justice, within and through US law.
  • A carefully selected compilation of United States Supreme Court Cases. Each case is chosen to guide readers through elements of US jurisprudence which reflect both reform and retrenchment of societal inequity as it relates to the question of race. Cases range from significant 18th century cases such as Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) (indigenous people cannot transfer full title to land) to contemporary civil rights decisions such as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) (further limiting the reach of the Voting Rights Act) and Comcast v. National Association of African American Owned Media (2020) (limiting protections against racial discrimination in contracting).
  • Doctrinally and theoretically significant cases from lower federal courts and state courts. Cases from lower courts are selected to provide critical race insights into how judicial institutions outside the US Supreme Court shape doctrine and debates over race and racial inequality. Cases range from Acre v. Douglass (9th Cir. 2015) (ban on teaching of Mexican American studies found unconstitutional) to Lobato v. Taylor (Colo. 2003) (speculator attempts to divest Mexican American landowners with defective title derived from Mexico).
  • Significant legislative and executive legal documents. This supplement includes materials going beyond traditional edited cases, reflecting the insight that a critical race analysis necessitates a grasp of law beyond the courts. Additional materials range from the United States Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015) to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020.

Benefits for instructors and students:

  • Provokes discussion on contemporary and historical legal controversies cases and materials edited to address issues the lens of critical race theory’s conceptual framework
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About the authors
Derrick Bell
Professor
Harvard University New York University

Derrick Bell's contributions as a civil rights advocate, intellectual instigator, scholar, and professor at Harvard University and New York University are immeasurable. His work and presence have been foundational to an entire field of law and legal scholarship, Critical Race Theory. He mentored generations of legal scholars, social justice advocates, and students, inspiring thousands to live out their commitments to fight racial injustice. He taught with his whole self by repeatedly demonstrating his willingness to contest the prevailing status quo.

His passing in 2011 came before he could complete the seventh revision of his groundbreaking text, Race, Racism and American Law, first published in 1973. That text was the first of its kind and, like its author, was intellectually demanding, encyclopedic, and innovative. It was also a product of a restless spirit that did not settle for easy answers or self-reassuring platitudes.

As a witness to and participant in a pivotal and historic period of the fight for racial justice, Professor Bell, perhaps more than many, understood both the possibility and limits of the law and relentlessly pursued the clear-eyed, unsentimental truth. He had seen that the trajectory of the struggle for racial justice was not a linear upward path but a jagged and sometimes nearly indiscernible road, with switchbacks, cutouts, cul-de-sacs, and only scattered lookouts of soaring vistas. Nevertheless, he insisted that we achieve a sense of direction by constantly testing and contesting ideas.

Professor Bell's story and trajectory—from civil rights practice to theory—introduced a different way of approaching the study and teaching of law. Instead of centering the Supreme Court as the protagonist in the quest for civil and human rights, he centered the social movements that sought to enforce the promises and commitments codified in the country's fundamental law. He put it more eloquently than anyone else could: The movement for racial justice 'was much more than the totality of the judicial decisions, the anti-discrimination laws and the changes in racial relationships reflected in those legal milestones…' His mission was to find 'a method of expression adequate to the phenomenon of rights gained, then lost, then gained again.' He helped us understand that the movement was not bound by time or existing doctrine. It was instead a commitment to carry the fight across generations, despite its repeated derailment.

Cheryl I. Harris

Cheryl I. Harris is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at UCLA School of Law, where she has been a professor of law since 1998 and was a founding member of the law school's Critical Race Studies Program, serving as its faculty director several times. She teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, and Race Conscious Remedies. She holds a joint appointment with UCLA's Department of African American Studies and served as the department's Chair from 2014-2016 in its early formation years. Author of the acclaimed "Whiteness as Property" (Harvard Law Review), Professor Harris is a leading scholar in Critical Race Theory and is recognized for her foundational contributions to the field. A graduate of Wellesley College and Northwestern School of Law, Professor Harris began her career as an appellate and trial litigator at leading criminal defense firms in Chicago. As part of her pro bono work, she contributed to major civil and human rights projects, including the police oversight measures and the development of anti-apartheid sanctions legislation. Following the historic election of Harold Washington as Chicago's first Black mayor, Professor Harris became a senior legal advisor in the City's Office of Legal Counsel, where she helped craft major reform initiatives designed to improve government accountability, transparency, and racial equity. Professor Harris began teaching law in 1990 at Chicago-Kent College of Law. In 1991, she was a key organizer of conferences between U.S. legal scholars and South African lawyers during the development of South Africa's first democratic constitution, ratified in 1994. Since then, she has been a part of human rights delegations in several conflict zones included Northern Ireland and Haiti and participated in convenings on race, inequality, and human rights across the globe.

Justin Hansford

Justin Hansford is an elected member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) for the 2022-2025 term and Executive Director, Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, and Howard University. Professor Hansford was previously a Democracy Project Fellow at Harvard University, a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and an Associate Professor of Law at Saint Louis University. He has a B.A. from Howard University and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was a founder of the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives. Professor Hansford also has received a Fulbright Scholar award to study the legal career of Nelson Mandela, and served as a clerk for Judge Damon J. Keith on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Professor Hansford has also worked to empower the Ferguson community through community based legal advocacy.

Amna A. Akbar

Amna A. Akbar is the Charles W. Ebersold & Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Professor Akbar is a preeminent scholar who writes and teaches about the theories and practices of social movements and social change, criminal law, policing, race, and inequality. Her groundbreaking research has appeared in prestigious legal and social science journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, California Law Review, and NOMOS. She serves on the editorial board of the Law and Political Economy Blog and regularly writes for popular audiences in outlets like The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and N+1.

In 2021, Professor Akbar was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation. She also previously served as a fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Professor Akbar is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (spring) and University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law (fall). She clerked for Judge Gerard E. Lynch on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and worked as a staff attorney at Queens Legal Service Corp. in a community-based battered women’s project.

Atiba Ellis

Atiba R. Ellis is the Laura B. Chisolm Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. A nationally noted voting rights scholar, his primary research focuses on how racial and class-based oppression interact continues to abridge and deny the right to vote to communities on the margins of American democracy. His work has analyzed voter identification laws for their socioeconomic effects, situated felon disenfranchisement laws as enforcing a political underclass, analyzed the theoretical scope of the Citizens United decision and described the ideological drivers of vote suppression. His work is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning doctrinal legal analysis, critical political theory, race and the law, legal history, and innovative legal pedagogy. Professor Ellis’s current research focuses on how ideologically driven conceptions of “wrongful voters” diminish the right to vote. He has also written on critical legal theory and legal history. In addition to his scholarly research, Professor Ellis frequently blogs, presents academic lectures and provides commentary on issues regarding race and the law, the law of politics, and other civil rights and constitutional law matters.

Audrey G. McFarlane

Audrey McFarlane is the Dean Julius Isaacson Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty Research & Development at University of Baltimore School of Law. Professor McFarlane’s research and teaching focus on areas of law related to economic development. Her scholarship examines the ways in which economic development is not a neutral policy that government can advance without addressing significant structural issues related to race, class and geography. Her most recent works have focused on how mixed income housing reflects social domination and seeks to manage discrimination and how constitutional doctrine should evaluate the propriety of inclusionary zoning in ways that account for developers’ role and influence on development decision-making. Professor McFarlane has also written on a range of topics including how norms of property law contribute to recurrent foreclosure crises, the insights of critical race theory for eminent domain and regulatory takings, and democratic theoretical justifications for community participation in economic development. She has been a visiting professor at Northeastern School of Law, Seattle University School of Law and University of Maryland School of Law. Professor McFarlane has an A.B. from Harvard-Radcliffe and a J.D. from Stanford Law School where she was a member of the Stanford Law Review. She joined the University of Baltimore School of Law faculty after clerking for the Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and working as an associate at the Washington D.C. law firm of Wilmer Cutler and Pickering. At UBalt, she teaches courses in Property, Land Use, Local Government and Local Economic Development and is the former Associate Dean of Faculty Research & Development.”
Product Information
Publication date
2023-01-10
Copyright Year
2023
Pages
1068
Paperback
9781543850291
Connected eBook (Digital Only)
9798886148367
Subject
Civil Rights / Race and the Law , Race and the Law
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