the Alchemy of Race and Rights

I know it's super early to post this weeks blog but it's Coachella this weekend so I just decided to post mine now. I wanted to do one more of Williams' chapter because I did not present this chapter in class and also did not use it in my long essay. so here you go...

Patricia Williams hates being a lawyer. She practices and teaches commercial law and often finds herself confronted with heart-wrenching stories. Williams is a black woman and deeply sympathizes with the plight of women and blacks in the United States. She notes increasing crime rates, drug use, police brutality, and the like pervade the country. Racism penetrates even at the highest levels of culture, as demonstrated by the "inability" of Harvard to find more qualified black women to be professors.

The goal of the Alchemy of Race and Rights is to take a critical theory approach to rights, particularly to commercial and constitutional concerns. Williams will take three principles and try to show how they interact, conflict ,and interlock: (i) autonomy, (ii) community and (iii) order. She also aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice. She wants to show how legal language often flattens complex issues and hides subtle social meanings.

Williams believes that law is inter-subjective and that it has no objective, mind-independent aspect. If we recognize that the law is inter-subjective, we can participate in its construction together. Williams's target in her book is the common conception of law as objective. This theoretical conception of the law in American jurisprudence has three features: (i) it draws bright lines between concepts to make life easier, such as between rights and needs, public and private and white and black, (ii) it

looks for non-contextual universal legal truths, (iii) and it aims to find an objective, unmediated voice to express the nature of the law.

As a woman who in her differing social roles is treated both as black and non-black, Williams sees that social identities are constructed and that social concepts are as well. We construct truth together and by getting away from the idea of objective truth, we can extend a sense of social responsibility to all individuals in constructing their social and political world. This will empower the marginalized members of society. Traditional jurisprudence looks for an uncompromising point of reference, which obscures the mechanisms of social positioning and thereby covers up the opportunities for productive group struggle. Williams acknowledges that when she makes these arguments, her students are often confused. She admits that she is as well.