The President of the United States has spent all morning tweeting about "critical race theory", fun! You may ask, gentle readers, what exactly is that, how can I learn more, and does it have any relevance to me? Sounds really interesting, no? It is! A few points below.... /1
First, you'll want to learn a bit about critical legal studies (CLS), one of the most influential scholarly movements in American law schools in the latter half of the 20th century, which built on ideas first developed by the American legal realists in the 1920s and 30s. /2
Actually, Princeton's LAPA program held a neat conference in February on the intellectual history of CLS, which included a panel discussion with some of the key founders (Duncan Kennedy, David Trubek, and Mark Tushnet) which you can watch here: /3 clsconference.princeton.edu/video-the-foun…
Critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the 1980s as a way to apply (and build on) CLS insights now with specific reference to issues of race. Some of the folks who got CRT up & running include the late Derrick Bell, @mari_matsuda, @sandylocks, Richard Delgado, and Neil Gotanda. /4
To learn more about the ideas developed under CRT, you should go read all of the above authors (and more!), it is a rich and varied field which probably has had more vitality over the past few decades than its CLS forebear. /5
But one article I would especially recommend is @sandylocks' 1988 article in the @HarvLRev on "Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law" -- an article which had a big intellectual influence on me, personally. /6
One major point in the article which cuts against certain CLS shibboleths -- and which I've carried over into my own work on Chinese law -- is that formal legal reforms *do* matter. In Professor Crenshaw's words: /7 
But that is the not the end of the story, for as Professor Crenshaw's article also notes, in the tradition of critical race thinking, and also with relevance to those of us who work in the seemingly different area of Chinese law: /8
That two-step is enormously important, in my view, and deeply informs my own thinking about a range of legal subjects, including in my work on administrative litigation in China, see, e.g.: /9
taylorfrancis.com/books/e/978131…
taylorfrancis.com/books/e/978131…
So, in sum, props to CRT for the vitality it has brought to legal discourse; nice that POTUS's tweets today will lead even broader audiences to this important work; and I hope fellow scholars of Chinese law will find this field as intellectually stimulating as I have. /END
