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.

Reviews

"[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
"The essays in this volume, written by some of the nation's leading scholars, offer fresh interpretations and analyses of arguably the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century while addressing some of the most perplexing questions about race and the law in contemporary American society. What emerges is a work of remarkable legal precision that will force scholars to think of Brown, and the legal process, in a totally different
light....an engaging and provocative collection."--The American Journal of Legal History
"[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