Civil Rights History: The Old and the New

Abstract

This paper responds to Risa Goluboff's review of the author's book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, and argues that civil rights history, and legal history more generally, has developed to the point where one may usefully distinguish between older approaches to socio-legal history that became mainstream in the late 1980s and 1990s, and newer approaches to the field that have developed in the succeeding years. Approaches to legal history that examine law, lawyers and legal consciousness as a mediating force between the formal legal system and the larger society have become so common in the field that they have lost their novelty. This paper frames Representing the Race as part of a newer corpus of writing that diverges somewhat from the core concerns of this older scholarship, and offers some observations on the future direction of legal history.