Legal Methods II: Critical Race Methods: Practices, Prisms, and Problems

Method of Evaluation: Students will be given an option to produce a text that uses at least two of the methods reviewed in class including a pleading, memorandum, testimony, op ed, or some other approved test.

The United States suffers from many forms of discrimination, most of which are based on group factors such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. The text of the American
Constitution expressly forbids states from discriminating on some bases, most especially race, and a wide body of state and federal legislation also forbids various forms of discrimination by individual citizens in a variety of economic and social contexts. The legal prohibition against discrimination does not, however, fully capture the relationship between legal practices and
racial inequality. This seminar will undertake a deeper interrogation of the legal terrain of discrimination by examining the interface between legal interpretation, lawmaking practices, and
racial hierarchy. Our focus will be on the legal methods through which race and racism have been constructed and contested by law, both over time and within the contemporary social
order.

In the process, we will examine a variety of methods that have been aggregated under the rubric of Critical Race Theory including intersectionality, historicism, anti-formalism, social
construction, storytelling, and denaturalizing baselines. This introductory treatment of critical legal methods will not only assess what is “critical” about Critical Race Theory but will deploy it
to examine contemporary efforts to regulate and censor its interpretive tools and practices.