Law Unbound!

Adrien Katherine Wing, Jean Stefancic

“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

• Part I Narrative and Legal Storytelling; Chapter 1 Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others; Chapter 2 Rodrigo’s Chronicle; Chapter 3 Rodrigo’s Third Chronicle; Chapter 4 Rodrigo’s Final Chronicle; Chapter 5 Rodrigo’s Eleventh Chronicle; Part II Critical Theory; Chapter 6 The Racial Double Helix; Chapter 7 Rodrigo’s Fourth Chronicle; Chapter 8 Rodrigo’s Eighth Chronicle; Chapter 9 Rodrigo’s Ninth Chronicle; Chapter 10 Linking Arms; Part III Law, Legal Education, and the Legal Profession; Chapter 11 The Imperial Scholar; Chapter 12 Rodrigo’s Thirteenth Chronicle; Chapter 13 Official Elitism or Institutional Self-Interest?; Part IV Hate Speech; Chapter 14 Words that Wound; Chapter 15 The “More Speech” Solution; Chapter 16 Campus Antiracism Rules; Chapter 17 Toward a Legal Realist View of the First Amendment; Part V Law Reform; Chapter 18 The Social Construction of Brown v. Board of Education; Chapter 19 Joseph Sax, the Public Trust Theory of Environmental Protection, and Some Dark Thoughts on the Possibility of Law Reform; Chapter 20 On Taking Back Our Civil Rights Promises; Chapter 21 Rodrigo’s Sixth Chronicle; Part VI Latinos and Other Nonblack Minorities; Chapter 22 Rodrigo’s Fifteenth Chronicle; Chapter 23 Derrick Bell’s Toolkit; Part VII Politics and Critique; Chapter 24 Shadowboxing; Chapter 25 Rodrigo’s Seventh Chronicle; Chapter 26 Rodrigo’s Remonstrance; Chapter 27 Rodrigo’s Roadmap; Chapter 28 Zero-Based Racial Politics; Part VIII Affirmative Action; Chapter 29 1998 Hugo L. Black Lecture; Chapter 30 Rodrigo’s Tenth Chronicle;