In 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird (1) was published to significant popular acclaim: a reception that has proved enduring. Mockingbird remains one of the most widely circulated works in United States history. (2) Curiously enough, however, the nonpareil American novel known for its condemnation of racism has proven itself a more venerable object in the heart of the legal establishment than in that of the literary--a peculiarity which has given rise to frequent comment. Despite its Pulitzer Prize, few literary scholars have engaged critically with the work. (3) Comparatively, Harper Lee's novel and the characters she constructs therein have received an unexpected and atypical amount of attention from a field--law (4)--that is defined by objective, rational perspectivalism and which is notorious for its ostensible disdain of the fictional and activist. Indeed, entire symposia and law review volumes have been dedicated to the work. (5) The book, however, steadfastly maintains its position as a masterpiece in the canons of American literature. Popular response to Mockingbird has been remarkable: it has enjoyed ninety-four separate printings and appeared on secondary school reading lists as often as any other book in the English language. (6) By the close of the 1980s, Lee's story was mandatory reading in seventy percent of all public schools. (7) A 1991 survey found To Kill a Mockingbird listed second only to the Bible as the book that has had the most meaningful impact on the respondents' lives. (8) The popular and nascent critical treatment of Mockingbird has emphasized the story's racial themes. Perceptions of race--particularly white notions of black inferiority--are clearly a central object of critique in Lee's novel. To Kill a Mockingbird, after all, was a work penned in response to the agitated and volatile scenery of 1950s and 60s America--a period renowned as much for its omnipresent reactionary violence as for its peaceful protest and civil disobedience. All around Lee, the intransigence of the South following the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (9) was on stark display. (10) In scripting Mockingbird, Lee sought to document the region's historic problem with racism and expose the anatomy of segregation at the moment of its legal dismantling. In doing so, she perspicaciously commented on the institutional mechanisms of racial hierarchy, (11) and ultimately turned to fiction to facilitate cultural change in the face of law's failure to end the injustices visited upon black citizens of southern towns. (12) While Mockingbird remarks on race openly, the book also invokes the theoretical framework of developed by critical race theorists in the legal academy. These theorists argue that race does not occur independently of the histories of gender or sexuality. (13) Rather, gender and sexuality heavily influence and shape our conceptions of race. It is this additional layer to Lee's writing, her condemnation of southern mores regarding femininity and sexuality, which helps further expose the variety of institutional strategies operating to construct and police race both in past and present. The theory of intersectionality is explicated by Professor Kimberle Crenshaw in her landmark essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. (14) Professor Crenshaw postulates that a black woman is more than just the separate layerings of gender plus race; she is a distinct personality who confronts distinctive forms of harassment and bias. (15) Because courts fail to grasp the mutually constitutive ways in which race and gender interact, black women's subjectivity and injuries go unrecognized. (16) Warning us, Crenshaw extends the following cautionary advice: It is incumbent on feminism to interrogate and take account of the ways in which dominant conceptions of gender are situated in, and operate in tandem with, histories of racial subordination. …