The University of Pennsylvania Law Review has published "Race in Contract Law," by Dylan Penningroth (University of California, Berkeley). Here's the abstract:
Modern contract law is rife with ideas about race and slavery and
cases involving African Americans, but that presence is very hard to
see. This Article recovers a hidden history of race in contract law,
from its formative era in the 1870s, through the Realist critiques of
the early 1900s to the diverse intellectual movements of the 1970s
and 80s. Moving beyond recent accounts of “erasure,” and complementing
Critical Race Theorists’ insights about law’s role in constructing,
naturalizing, and justifying racial inequality, the Article offers a
historically rich account of when, where, and why legal professionals
have highlighted race in contract law.
The full article is available here.
-- Karen Tani
