Analytical Paper Optional: All enrolled students have the option of completing a research paper of at least 20-25 pages, with faculty and peer review of a substantially complete draft. This paper can be used to satisfy the analytical paper requirement for J.D. students.

Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: No Exam

What is race? What is law? What does law have to do with race and other categories of identity formation, and racial inequality? This seminar will address these topics from the perspective of jurisprudence and legal theory. We will examine the role law plays in creating racial categories, in maintaining and eliminating racial hierarchy, and in policing the borders between race and other classifications such as gender, sexuality and ethnicity. The civil rights movement taught mainstream Americans that law could be a tool to remedy past sins and to make the promise of equality real for all citizens. In recent years, however, this conception of law and its role in the world has been criticized from many quarters, and many of those doubts have coalesced into a field now known as Critical Race Theory. Even the concept of race itself, which had once seemed so stable, has been critiqued as masking more complex stories of intersecting identities. Some scholars have turned to storytelling techniques to more fully grasp the reality of race and other once-stable categories, and their intersection with law. Others have asked these kinds of questions in calling for new approaches to topics such as civil rights law, the study of capitalism and economic inequality, and criminal justice. Course readings will mainly consist of legal scholarship that explores or critiques these developments.