Race, Human Bodies and the Law: A Conversation

Join the Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) in partnership with the Africana Studies Program for an engaging conversation with Professor Patricia J. Williams, author of The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies and the Spirit of the Law, and Linda Greenhouse, an award-winning journalist and former staff member of The New York Times.

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The Miracle of the Black Leg examines the relationships between history, law and identity. 

Patricia Williams
Northeastern University Distinguished Professor of Law, MacArthur Foundation Fellow, author

One of the most provocative intellectuals in American law and a pioneer of both the law and literature and critical race theory movements in American legal theory, Williams holds a joint appointment with the School of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Religion in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also director of Law, Technology and Ethics Initiatives in the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, literature and law. Her pathbreaking books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991), illustrate some of the United States’ most complex societal problems and challenge our ideas about socio-legal constructs of race and gender. Her work remains at the cutting edge of legal scholarship. Drawing on her prior interrogations of race, gender and personhood, Williams’ current research raises core questions of individual autonomy and identity in the context of legal and ethical debates on science and technology. Her work in the area of health and genetics, for example, questions how racial formation is shaped by the legal regulation of private industry and government. Her work on algorithms grapples with the auditing function of technology in our everyday lives that reshapes our understanding of who we are.

Linda Greenhouse
Senior Research Scholar in Law, Yale Law School

Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008. She teaches at Yale Law School and is the author of the memoir Just a Journalist. Her other books include The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction; a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Becoming Justice Blackmun; Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court; and The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right, which she wrote with Michael J. Graetz.

Food and drinks will be available in person. A livestream link will be sent out closer to the event date.