Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw for the Supreme Court!

I rarely find myself disagreeing with Melissa Harris-Lacewell, and this is no exception. This week she wrote a post on The Nation advocating for the nomination of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to fill the Supreme Court spot vacated by Souter. Crenshaw is one of my all-time feminist heroes and a leading thinker in Critical Race Theory. Samples of Crenshaw's ass-kicking work on the intersection of the social constructions of race and gender and their role in judicial decisions can be found here and here. In the words of Harris-Lacewell:

Kimberle Crenshaw is a field-defining critical race scholar who earned a law degree from Harvard. Her writings on race, gender, and the power of law dynamically altered the academic discourse in law schools throughout the world. Her work has been central to political movements here in the United States and to the development of emerging democracies globally. She is a prolific legal scholar and a respected public intellectual.

There is no one on the current court with the expansive, progressive, clarity of legal reasoning that Crenshaw has demonstrated for more than twenty years. As a justice Crenshaw would have the potential to substantially revise our understanding of American constitutional law by articulating elements of the American experience that have never before been integrated into our constitutional interpretation. She would open up the unique possibility of black feminist scholarship and practice challenging American jurisprudence from the inside out.

Click here to join the Kimberle Crenshaw for the Supreme Court Facebook group!

2 comments:

  1. Nicole5/05/2009

    Ohmygod I love Kimberle Crenshaw so much I become totally inarticulate on the topic. Think of the bricks conservatives would shit upon her nomination, though. Zikes.

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