Richard Delgado

Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative

This is one of the earliest pieces to address legal storytelling or narrative analysis. It explains why it is helpful both to tell and analyze legal stories. A middle section tells a story of a single event – a black lawyer interviews for a position at a top school and is rejected – from several points of view. The article thus is both an exemplar of legal storytelling as well as an effort to analyze and defend the genre.

Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography

The first bibliography to classify critical race theory law review articles and books under many headings and categories and provide a short description of the contents of each item. Updated two years later at 66 U. Colo. L. Rev. 159 (1995).

The Imperial Scholar Revisited: How to Marginalize Outsider Writing, TenYears Later

Investigates the state of affairs now that critical race theorists and radical feminists have entered the legal academy in substantial numbers. Revisits the original article, The Imperial Scholar, and explores whether the new generation of majority-race (white) scholars continue to operate in an insular fashion that marginalizes outsider and minority writers. Documents how the descendants of the original imperial scholars -- white academics writing about race in the top reviews -- although younger and hipper than the original versions, continue the same exclusionary pattern of neglect and non-citation. Concludes that those who control the terms of discourse will marginalize outsider writing as long as possible.

Goodbye to Hammurabi: Analyzing the Atavistic Appeal of Restorative Justice

A recent innovation in criminal justice, the restorative justice movement has serious implications for the relationship among crime, race, and communities. Restorative justice, which sprang up in the mid-1970s as a reaction to the perceived excesses of harsh retribution, features an active role for the victims of crime, required community service or some other form of restitution for offenders, and face-to-face mediation in which victims and offenders confront each other in an effort to understand each others common humanity. This article questions whether restorative justice can deliver on its promises. Drawing on social science evidence, the author shows that the informal setting in which victim-offender mediation takes place is apt to compound existing relations of inequality. It also forfeits procedural rights and shrinks the public dimension of disputing. The article compares restorative justice to the traditional criminal justice system, finding that they both suffer grave deficiencies in their ability to dispense fair, humane treatment. Accordingly, it urges that defense attorneys and policymakers enter into a dialectic process that pits the two systems of justice, formal and informal, against each other in competition for clients and community support. In the meantime, defense attorneys should help defendants find and exploit opportunities for fair, individualized treatment that may be found in each system.

Why Do We Tell the Same Stories?: Law Reform, Critical Librarianship, and the Triple Helix Dilemma

Commercial indexing tools used in legal and bibliographic research ease the job of the scholar or lawyer, but confine thought and discovery to predetermined channels, making it difficult to hit upon truly novel legal ideas or theories. The structure of legal research tools, then, exercises a powerful homeostatic force toward the current order, rendering reform difficult even to imagine.

Critical Race Theory and Criminal Justice

In this speech delivered at an inaugural colloquium at John Jay College, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic address the implications of Critical Race Theory (CRT) for criminal law and justice. CRT sprang up in the late 1980s when the Civil Rights Movement stalled; new theories were needed to cope with emerging forms of institutional or “colorblind” racism and a public that seemed tired of hearing about race. Critical race theorists showed how racism is routine, not exceptional, and that liberal accounts were inadequate to understand its persistence and power. Although Critical Race Theory has provided many useful insights, it has largely left crime and criminal justice unexplored. Delgado and Stefancic review the history of CRT, including the small number of efforts to come to terms with crime and delinquency by CRT scholars, and list a number of issues that seem ripe for critical analysis. They also show how such critical tools as interest convergence, social constructionism, differential racialization, legal storytelling, and the critique of White normativity may help understand societys fixation on Black and Latino criminality. They conclude by urging critical scholars to devote more attention to crime and race and to propose a research agenda for the future.

Rodrigo's eighth chronicle: black crime, white fears. on the social construction of threat

Discusses how society has constructed African Americans, unfairly, as dangerous and criminal. Shows how statistics fail to support the common assumption that black crime is more extensive and damaging to society than that perpetrated by other groups, especially upper-class whites in executive suites. Shows that white, not black, crime is more likely to get you killed or raid your pocketbook than all street crime combined.

Derrick Bell and the Ideology of Racial Reform: Will We Ever Be Saved?

This article analyzes optimism and despair in the writing of a major Critical Race Theory figure. Derrick Bell is considered one of the movement’s founders and leading writers. Yet his work is at times overtly pessimistic — he believes that American society will never elevate blacks to full equality. Yet, he encourages his readers to struggle for that goal. Are these two elements in his thought irreconcilable? No, effort and struggle in pursuit of impossible goals is, at times, fulfilling and satisfying, often the only alternative open to a person in a desperate situation.

Rodrigo's Thirteenth Chronicle: Legal Formalism and Law's Discontents

The public are discontent with lawyers, believing them cold, impersonal, and grasping. At the same time, lawyers are unhappy with their work, finding it overly regimented and pressured. Rodrigo and the professor, joined by Giannina, Rodrigo’s wife, who is now a law student at a top school, discuss what lies behind these discontents, which they deem related. They also trace them to a common source, namely law’s preoccupation with form, formalism, and doctrine at the expense of human values and connection.

Hateful Speech, Loving Communities: Why Our Notion of a Just Balance Changes so Slowly

Identifies one reason why proponents of hate-speech regulation encounter resistance -- often, it is the stubborn manner in which we frame the two core values at stake, equal dignity and freedom of speech. Illustrates the shortcomings of judicial balancing as a way of resolving the tensions between these two opposing values. Uses narrative theory to show how society prevents canonical ideas and social structures from undergoing rapid change. Explores routes that reformers may take that may circumvent these obstacles.