Race and Races: Constructing a New Legal Actor

Abstract

One crucial consequence of our classroom pedagogy is the formation of certain kinds of thinkers and actors. Most of us acknowledge this, in a general way: our teaching helps students to think like lawyers. Some scholars have theorized this thought process more specifically, when they have written, for example, about the kinds of intellectual habits engendered through rigorous exposure to the case method,' or the kinds of attitudes toward hierarchy produced by the substance and method of legal education.2 But what is true of pedagogic methods, such as the Socratic method or case study, is also true of the texts from which students learn the law. The kinds of materials students encounter, the questions to which they are exposed, and the strategies and avenues for producing change with which they are presented, all contribute to the shaping of an actor who responds in particular ways to the law, or to the social problems it seeks to address. Yet the recognition that choices made within casebooks can shape legal professionals has been slower to emerge, even among those scholars who have offered radical critiques of the law. Many factors may be responsible, from the institutional caution of casebook publishers to the divided attention of those seeking to establish the legitimacy of new bodies of legal