Symposium Honors Law Prof. Patricia Williams

After completing her 1991 autobiographical book The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia J. Williams faced a dilemma. The Library of Congress wanted to catalog it under “Afro-Americans—Civil Rights” and “Law Teachers,” while she asked her editor at Harvard University Press to press for “Autobiography,” “Fiction,” “Gender Studies” and “Medieval Medicine.” She didn’t get everything she wanted but the final classification for the boundary-crossing book included multiple headings, including “Feminist Criticism” and “Race Relations.”

The many ways of categorizing Williams’ work, which straddles the lines between journalism, political science, memoir and the law, were a frequent theme at a daylong symposium March 1 devoted to her scholarship. The program was sponsored by Columbia’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.

“Most legal scholars tend to be more hedgehogs than foxes,” said the center’s director, Katherine Franke, alluding to a famous distinction by British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “They tend to burrow deep into an area of law rather than bring their intellectual talents to bear on a range of social problems or diverse disciplinary locations.” Williams was a clear exception, she said.

The James L. Dohr Professor of Law, Williams brings experience from inside and outside the academy to her writings on discrimination, identity and public policy. A graduate of Wellesley and Harvard Law, she practiced for a time as a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles and consumer advocate at Western Center on Law and Poverty before chucking the law entirely to pursue a Ph.D. in English literature. She joined the Columbia law faculty in 1992, earning a MacArthur “genius” award eight years later.

Throughout the day, speakers offered examples of how Williams has pioneered a genre of legal writing that uses personal narrative to examine the complex relation between law and society. “Her arguments don’t always draw from the familiar tools of the legal trade—rationality and logic, objectivity and detachment, rules and precedent—rather, her special craft relies equally on anguish and self-doubt, indignation and rage, particularity and the personal,” Franke said, adding that Williams’ “work makes an argument about the gap—sometimes an abyss—between law and justice.”

Williams’ work has been fundamental to critical race studies, which calls into question the notion of the law as disinterested, neutral and color-blind. Anita Hill and Lani Guinier, both at the center of race and gender battles in the 1990s, described the power of Williams’ prose.

Now a professor at Brandeis University, Hill noted the way that Williams’ openness and willingness to talk about her personal experience draws in the reader. Guinier, a Harvard law professor, said that two decades later, she still vividly remembers a story Williams told of pressing her face against a SoHo shop window and pushing the buzzer to get in, only to have a teenage clerk say the store was closed, even though white shoppers were visible inside.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, where Williams writes a regular column called “Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” sat in the audience holding Williams’ first column in the liberal journal, from 1997. In it, Williams muses about how Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might have voted in Brown v. Board of Education as well as an East Harlem school using public funds to educate girls only. Both situations cause her to worry about the durability of racial justice.

Anna Deavere Smith, the acclaimed actress who teaches at New York University, performed two dramatic selections, one of which touched on Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Smith got to know Williams at an arts showcase she founded. Audience member Bela August Walker (LAW ’03), a professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, recalled sleeping with a battered copy of The Alchemy of Race and Rights on her bedside table to serve as a reminder of why she came to law school.

In her own remarks at the end of the day, Williams spoke of the writing assignment while she was studying English literature that led to her famous essay, “On Being the Object of Property,” which involved how her great-great-grandmother was impregnated by her white slave owner, a lawyer.

Her professor at the time, Sacvan Bercovitch, who teaches American literature at Harvard, helped her land a book contract on the strength of that piece, which eventually became The Alchemy of Race and Rights, widely taught since its publication in 1991.

Paradoxically, Williams said, the book “that I wrote as an escape hatch from the legal profession ended up drawing me back into it as I became both hailed and assailed for being genre busting and quirky.”