ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author declares that law and society scholars have not been sufficiently attentive to issues of racial inequality, racial ideology, and racial identity. Critical race theory emerged in the middle-to-late 1980s, concomitant with a critical mass of racial minorities entering the legal professoriate. Critical race theory and law and society both share at least partial lineage in critical legal studies (CLS) — the leftist scholarly movement that rocked legal scholarship in the 1970s. Critical race theory is one of the few genres of legal scholarship that has drawn widespread attention outside the legal academy, with departments of education, American studies, African American studies, and ethnic studies now posting course offerings in critical race theory. American judges throughout the nineteenth century were forced to tell narratives of racial taxonomy — legal opinions that set the boundaries marking particular bodies as white, black, Indian, and Asian".
