Carving Out a Humanity: The Derrick Bell Lectures

Social justice advocate Bell (Lighting the Fires of Freedom) and Southerland, executive director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU School of Law, present incisive essays on racial injustice in America drawn from the school’s Derrick Bell lecture series. Created by coeditor Bell to honor her husband, law professor and critical race theory originator Derrick Bell (1930–2011), the series invites legal scholars to discuss issues related to law and race. Though varied in tone and intent, each piece is cogently argued and offers new perspectives on familiar topics, including how racial bias is embedded in the death penalty and the value of affirmative action. Highlights include legal historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello, on how the absence of legal protections for marriage and family caused enslaved people to be viewed as unreliable narrators of their own history; Boston University School of Law dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s comparison of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012; and The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander’s discussion of regrets over how she chose clients as a practicing civil rights attorney. Deeply enriched by the classroom and courtroom experiences of its contributors, this consistently insightful collection is a valuable resource for students and teachers of the law. (Nov.)