Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195106229 ISBN 13: 9780195106220

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

When it comes to race and racial issues these are strange times for all Americans. More than forty years after Brown v. Board of Education put an end to segregation of the races by law, current debates about affirmative action, multiculturalism, and racial hate speech reveal persistent uncertainty about the place and meaning of race in American culture and the role of law in guaranteeing racial equality. Moreover, all sides in those debates claim to be the true heirs to Brown, even as they disagree vehemently about its meaning.

Race, Law and Culture takes the continuing controversy about race in law and culture as an invitation to revisit Brown, using this case as a lens through which to view that controversy and the issues involved in it. The essays collected here describe the contested legacy of Brown as well as the way it is implicated in America's persistent uncertainties about race. In so doing they confront crucial questions about race, law and culture in contemporary America: What were the legal and cultural visions contained in Brown? How have those visions been articulated in other legal struggles? Why does the subject of race continue to haunt the American imagination? With original essays from contributors such as David Garrow, Lawrence Friedman, and Hazel Carby, this work will be an important perspective from which to view questions of race in modern America.

About this title

About the Author:

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, and Chair of the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He has co-authored many previous works on law, including The Rhetoric of Law, Law's Violence, and Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients.

Review:

"[This book's] rigorous but still snappy essays provide a multitude of fresh insights. Reading these reflections on Brown will cause any reader--legally trained or not--to think in new ways about thecrucial question of how much we want our law to mirror our complicated society."--Avaim Soifer, Dean and Professor of Law at Boston College Law School and author of Law and the Company We Keep

"In Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation by race unconstitutional, and thereby put an end to the long sorry history of national tolerance for America's official caste system. But the lessons it teaches, as the remarkable essays collected in Race, Law and Culture reveal, are cloudy and ambiguous, though still profoundly divisive.... Race, Law, and Culture contains some of the most powerful and original reassessments of Brown and its legacies to appear in recent years. By placing the Brown case both in the perspective of its own time and ours, the contributors help us understand what a great divide separates us from the vision of racial harmony of the 1950s."--Robert W. Gordon, Yale University

"...This book provides not only some excellent and rich essays, but a wonderful experiment in applying an essentially apolitical literary theory to an intensiely political concern."--Law and Politics Book Review

"...clear concise, and thoughtful essays that ought to be read by anyone with an interest in the book's subject."--Choice

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0195106229
• ISBN 13: 9780195106220
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Sarat Austin