by Patricia J. Williams
New Press
6/25/2024, hardcover
SKU: 9781620978160
Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist--aka the Mad Law Professor--tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more
Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man's leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.
With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer's training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences--and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers.
At the heart of "Wrongful Birth" is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child "comes out Black"; "Bodies in Law" explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And "Hot Cheeto Girl" examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny.
In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.
Reviews:
"Patricia Williams has masterfully meditated on the horrors emerging from an enduring legacy of sorting, selling, and packaging bodies and identities from slavery to the present, exposing the myriad ways in which the thicket of law, society, science, and medicine contribute to bruise the spirit and flesh of those most vulnerable from the start." -- Michele Goodwin, professor of law, Georgetown Law, host of the podcast On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, and author of Policing the Womb
"With her always stunning analyses of seemingly ordinary stories and the surprising connections she draws, Patricia Williams urges us to understand deeply and differently how our histories continue to produce us and how we might begin to dismantle ideas and structures so utterly dependent on our intellectual passivity." -- Angela Y. Davis, professor, UC Santa Cruz, and author of Women, Race, and Class
"With her incisive brilliance and stunning legal imagination, Patricia Williams yet again proves herself to be one of the sharpest thinkers on race and the law in our nation's history. Law is at the center of our contemporary national crises, and Williams takes us on a journey deep into the history of cases and doctrine to understand how we got here and why ideas about what law can and should be matter for all of us who believe in freedom. " -- Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling author of South to America
About the Author:
Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School and the longtime former "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" columnist for The Nation. She is a MacArthur fellow and the author of six books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Open House, and The Miracle of the Black Leg (The New Press). She is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University in Boston, where she lives.