Schools For Misrule,  PP. 162-163

“The movements that bid to replace CLS at law school centerstage—Critical Race Theory (CRT), FemCrit, and their many identity-based analogues—promised to be different. To begin with, they rejoiced in diversity, and would never be confused with a gathering of middle-aged straight Anglo white males. While equally or more radical than the CLS crowd, they intended to spend more time listening to the stories of those affected by law at street level and less time on arid doctrine-chopping. Above all, they would aspire to act and not just develop critiques.

One of CRT’s key manifestos appeared in 1987 in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, a flagship of Left scholarship. Its author was a star of the emerging school of thought, Mari Matsuda, then of Stanford (later Georgetown). Matsuda was to win fame as one of the authors of Words that Wound, the book that made the case for legal suppression of racist and otherwise hurtful speech, and thus helped prepare the way for university speech codes—CRT’s first and still most notable real-world accomplishment. In her Harvard article, Matsuda laid out a version of one of the theories for which CRT and Critical Studies would soon become best known—sometimes called standpoint epistemology—and then proposed a new practical objective toward which like-minded colleagues could work. [Read more…]