Routledge Law Unbound!: A Richard Delgado Reader

This book offers the best and most influential writings of Richard Delgado, one of the founding figures of the critical race theory movement and one of the earliest scholars to address the harms of hate speech. With excerpts from his classic law review articles, conversations with his famous alter ego Rodrigo Crenshaw, and comments on the vicissitudes of academic life, this book spans topics such as hate speech, affirmative action, the war on terror, the endangered status of black men, and the place of Latino/as in the civil rights equation. Review “Richard Delgado is a towering figure in contemporary legal studies. His subtle intelligence, deep love of justice, and democratic vision are contagious. There is no one like him on the scene!” ―Cornel West, Princeton University “Richard Delgado and his alter-ego Rodrigo are a breath of fresh air in the legal academy and social sciences―or perhaps a tornado, if tornados can be salutary. Delgado's essays mix passion, commitment, a hard-edged intellect, deep knowledge, and imagination to create a corpus of work that blows away conventional wisdom and easy assumptions. His insistence that class matters as well as race, that free speech should be examined as well as celebrated, that narrative generates as much insight as logic or data all teach us to be better scholars and better citizens. This collection of essays is a boon to those of us who already value his work and it will extend his reach to those poor benighted souls who do not yet know it as well as they should.” ―Jennifer Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government,and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University “A triple delight: a path-finding lawyer, a mesmerizing story-teller, and a Quixotic hero, all in one. The Rodrigo Chronicles are lucid explorations of the shifting paradigms that define America today. They prove that Richard Delgado is more than a brainchild of the Enlightenment; he's one of its sharpest critics. His work is at the avant-garde in rethinking race and democracy. In short, he's the real thing, and the rarest.” ―Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture and Five-College Fortieth Anniversary Professor, Amherst College and author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language "Richard Delgado has done it again! In these classic essays, Delgado's restless mind touches on everything from the politics of academic scholarship to the economics of right-wing activism, from the harms of hate speech to the connection between racism and free-market economics. His writing is crisp, his imagination lively, and his thoughts always provocative and trenchant. This is an essential collection for those interested in critical race theory and critical legal scholarship more generally." ―Angela P. Harris, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley About the Author Richard Delgado is University Distinguished Professor and Derrick Bell Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author, with Jean Stefancic, of No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda (Temple University Press, 1996). drien Katherine Wing is Bessie Dutton Murray Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the University of Iowa College of Law. Jean Stefancic is Research Professor of Law and Derrick Bell Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.