Race, Rights, and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory

Book Synopsis: Leading legal lights weigh in on key issues of race and the law—collected in honor of one of the originators of critical race theory“Penetrating essays on race and social stratification within policing and the law, in honor of pioneering scholar Derrick Bell.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

When Derrick Bell, one of the originators of critical race theory, turned sixty-five, his wife founded a lecture series with leading scholars, including critical race theorists, many of them Bell’s former students. Now these lectures, given over the course of twenty-five years, are collected for the first time in a volume Library Journal calls “potent” and Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, says “powerfully acknowledge(s) the persistence of structural racism.”

“To what extent does equal protection protect?” asks Ian Haney López in a penetrating analysis of the gaps that remain in our civil rights legal codes. Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, describes the hypersegregation of our cities and the limits of the law’s ability to change deep-seated attitudes about race. Patricia J. Williams explores the legacy of slavery in the law’s current constructions of sanity. Anita Allen discusses competing privacy and accountability interests in the lives of African American celebrities. Chuck Lawrence interrogates the judicial backlash against affirmative action. And Michelle Alexander describes what caused her to break ranks with the civil rights community and take up the cause of those our legal system has labeled unworthy.

Race, Rights, and Redemption (which was originally published in hardcover under the title Carving Out a Humanity) gathers some of our country’s brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium.

With contributions by: Michelle Alexander, Anita Allen, Derrick Bell, Stephen Bright, Paul Butler, John Calmore, Devon W. Carbado, William Carter Jr., Emma Coleman Jordan, Richard Delgado, Annette Gordon-Reed, Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Lani Guinier, Cheryl I. Harris, Ian Haney López, Sherrilyn Ifill, Charles Lawrence, Kenneth W. Mack, Mari Matsuda, Charles Ogletree, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Theodore M. Shaw, Kendall Thomas, Patricia J. Williams, Robert A. Williams

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