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Black Rage Confronts the Law
By Paul Harris
John Brittain is a professor of law at the University of Connecticut Law School. He wrote this book review while a distinguished visiting professor at Texas Southern University, Thurgood Marshall School of Law, 1997-98. He is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild, 1991-93.
289 pp. New York: New York University Press $26.95
Crime, race and poverty play a significant role in the American criminal justice system. A widespread perception in public opinion surveys, perpetrated in large part by the media, depicts most criminals as African-American or Latino. Indeed, this perception is not unfounded. Two thirds of all state and federal prisoners are non-white. This percentage is vastly disproportionate to their percentage of the general population. However, contrary to another popular impression, African Americans are not inherently prone to commit crime. Yet there is some connection between race and crime.
That connection is the subject of Paul Harris' new book, Black Rage Confronts the Law. The book provides a sociological examination of the link between racism in America and criminality, and it gives lawyers and defendants a criminal defense to legally excuse or justify the criminal behavior. In addition, the author, a law professor, people's lawyer and past president of the National Lawyers Guild, presents chapters which describe his own black rage defense trials and his views as a critical legal scholar. Black Rage Confronts the Law will appeal to trial lawyers, law students who are intellectually curious about the jurisprudence of critical legal studies (CRITS), and other readers interested in studying race, racism and American law.
Harris ties the black rage defense to the intellectual cousin of critical legal studies, critical race studies. A group of Black, Asian and Latino legal scholars have carved out a relatively new intellectual body of legal thought. The critical race theorists "`adopt a stance that presumes that racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military services.'" (Harris p.73) Similarly, the black rage defense presents certain criminal conduct in the context of social, political and economic experiences of African Americans. The defense challenges assumptions that the American legal system is...