Race and Law

Race and Law is a 3 hour course that meets twice a week. It focuses on historical and current issues that illustrate the critical and systemic ways in which law has been used to define race, to construct racial identity and to justify racial discrimination in the United States, as well as the attempts to utilize law to deconstruct those same structures. Topics include, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement, policing, mass incarceration, voting rights and processes, educational opportunity, affirmative action, language and accent discrimination, and generally the intersection of race and law with gender, sex, ethnicity, religion and other routes along which discrimination often travels in combination with race.