Word: religione
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bell, a professor at Harvard Law School, abandons the standard language of legal discourse, employing instead the device of parable to make his points about race, law, religion, and the intersection of the three. Through dialogues between his fictional characters Geneva Crenshaw, a civil rights lawyer who has tapped into an otherworldly body of Black demi-gods known as the Celestial Curia, and her Black law professor friend, Bell lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding the legal process--a way that is uniquely Black...
JUST AS Blacks took the white man's religion and made it their own, Bell argues, it is necessary for them to take the white man's law and make it Black folks'. As Crenshaw says in the book's final chapter, "If our slave ancestors could do so much with the Bible, we should be able to do no less with the Constitution...
...theology of litigation" less concerned with victory in individual cases than with the morality of the arguments which civil rights lawyers proffer in public. His argument is that Blacks need to define as sacred the American legal system and turn its courtrooms into a forum for Black religion to voice itself. In this way the Constitution, a document initially designed to protect slavery and since used to legitimize Black oppression, could be redefined as an instrument of liberation...
Since America's courtrooms are a space where the contradictions between ideals of freedom and the reality of racism frequently collide, the legal realm, it would seem, is a forum uniquely suited for the allegorical discourse of Black religion to express its faith in redemption and deliverance. The traditional reliance of legal discourse on abstractions such as "equal protection" and "due process" only further conceals the gap between American norm and reality...
...Religion...