Federal Courts, Race, and Power

This course explores how racial power is reified and operationalized through federal courts 
jurisprudence. Longstanding procedural and substantive mechanisms such as standing, 
federalism, and state sovereignty, among other core tenets in federal courts doctrine, emerge 
from a complex racialized context and history. The course grapples with the following 
questions: who is legally cognizable before federal courts and why? How have federal courts 
served as sites of racial retrenchment, remediation, and even resistance? How have legal 
advocates and movement lawyers effected change within, beyond, and in opposition to the 
procedural barriers they encounter through the “life of the law”?3 What should the role of 
federal courts be and how can we conceptualize pragmatic solutions when invoking the 
authority of federal courts?