My graduate seminar on ‘The Nature of Law‘ read and discussed critical race theory this past week. I’ve–along with my students–been thinking about the relationship of critical material like this–along with the critical legal studies readings we did over the last two weeks–to the definitional and foundational debates that so occupied us in the beginning of the semester. Certainly, we seemed to be distant, in our concerns and preoccupations, from the question of what law is ‘–at least in the way that, for instance, the folks engrossed in the natural law–positivism debate were. In one dimension. For instance, precisely because critique seizes upon normative failings, we were often discussing what the law ought to be as opposed to what it is. But in another, we aren’t.
For note that in providing the sort of critique critical race theory and critical legal studies are advancing, the kind that informs us it is an agent of social construction and reification, an instrument of ideological control, a diversion away from radical political and social change, toward change more palatable to the established orders, we are also being told a great deal about what the law is not. It is not an impartial dispenser of justice, and neither is it a reliable instrument of social change. The critical race theorist is able to remind us of law’s limitations and circumscriptions: the inability of its remedies to redress some kinds of particularly pernicious wrongs, its helplessness in the face of entrenched, ‘internal’ racism, the kind which deeply implicates every social, political, and economic reality it interacts with, its being frozen into accepted trajectories of reasoning and categorization that prevent it from playing the kind of role most optimistically envisaged for it by a certain species of liberal theorizing. For instance, the critical race theorist’s advancement of an argument for reparation shows how current legal reasoning and analysis is inflexibly locked into presumptive modes of inquiry and understanding about guilt, responsibility, and even the ontology of groups and persons, that lead to a reflexive rejection of such claims. Law constructs many social facts, and there are many others that construct it in turn.
The critical theorist also–most crucially–adds color and depth to the earlier bloodless debates about whether law is understood as a system of rules, the command of a sovereign or the imperfect realization of a social morality. Critical theory informs us that the identity, the placement within social and political orderings and hierarchies, of legal actors–and those subject to them–is a crucial determinant of the content of law; it is a crucial force in determining the trajectories and workings out of a legal system. (Feminist legal theorists, who we will begin reading in two weeks time, will obviously bolster such identification.)
The nature of law remains crucially undertheorized unless its definitions are bolstered by critique. For it is only by means of the latter that the history of law can be seen and examined. And that, of course, is how we bring its coherence and incoherence to light.
Samir Chopra 