Foreword: Critical Race Theory and Empirical Methods

Abstract

Legal scholarship has engaged interdisciplinarity for over 100 years. “Legal Realism.” “Sociological Jurisprudence.” “Law and Society.” “Critical Legal Studies.” These are just a few of the labels applied to approaches that attempt to move beyond presumptions that legal doctrine and decision making are coherent and consistent in and of themselves or that they exist anterior to other social, political, and economic developments. In one form or another, these efforts use the knowledge and methods gleaned from other disciplines to understand the dynamic and interpenetrative relationship between law and society. Critical race theory (CRT) is an important part of this line of legal scholarship and has made several serious challenges to the doctrinal orthodoxy concerning race and the law since its development in the 1980s. The story of critical race theory as an intellectual movement has been well told elsewhere. 1 But, in order to appreciate the work pursued by this symposium issue on critical race theory and empirical methods, it is important to situate critical race theory as providing an account of race and the law that opposes traditional narratives that treat race and racism as unfortunate yet ancillary aspects of human relations that have been largely transcended in modern times. This opposition entails a systematic articulation of the persistence of White racial dominance that occurs not only in spite of social and legal developments that attempt to facilitate greater equality, but specifically because these developments contain residual privileges and limitations that nonetheless continue to structurally benefit Whites and subordinate people of color and other marginalized communities. Critical race theory can be seen as somewhat irreverent of standard legal