top of page
Previous and Present leaders
of Critical Race Theory
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was a lawyer, professor of law, and legal scholar best known for his legal work on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and his cynicism regarding the possibility of substantive racial justice in general as well as the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement.
He was also the first African American to be tenured at Harvard Law! Critical legal studies (CLS), a movement investigating how the legal system, rather than serving as an unbiased arbiter of justice, worked to uphold existing power systems, gave rise to critical racial theory (CRT), a school of legal thought.
When it came to examining related themes from the standpoint of race and racial injustice, critical race theorists like Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic were greatly impacted by Bell's ideas and work.
Bell attended the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and earned his degree there in 1957 after completing his studies at Duquesne University and serving a brief stint in the Air Force. Bell ultimately decided to pursue a career in law after hearing Thurgood Marshall's arguments in Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court (Martinez 2014).
Richard Delgado is an American law professor regarded, together with Derrick Bell, as one of the pioneers of critical race theory. At Seattle University School of Law, Delgado is a distinguished professor of law at the moment.
At the University of Alabama School of Law, he previously held the John J. Sparkman Chair of Law. Several of his books and papers have been co-authored by him and his wife, Jean Stefancic.
Also, he is renowned for his research on hate speech and for integrating narrative to the field of legal scholarship. Delgado was born in Mexico and raised by a Mexican-American father who came to the country by himself when he was 15 years old. He went to public schools while a child and lived in a mobile home. His undergraduate studies were in philosophy and mathematics at the University of Washington, after which he went on to the UC-Berkeley School of Law, where he received a J.D. and worked as an editor of the California Law Review.
Delgado had previously been a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, where he served as the John J. Sparkman Professor of Law and instructed classes on racial and civil rights. Before, he spent fourteen years teaching at the University of Colorado and eight years at the UCLA Law School (Martinez 2014).
At the UCLA School of Law, Cheryl I. Harris teaches constitutional law, civil rights, employment discrimination, critical race theory, and race-conscious remedies. She holds the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Professor Harris, a Wellesley College and Northwestern School of Law alumna, started her teaching career in 1990 at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Prior to that, she worked for one of Chicago's top criminal defense firms and later worked as a senior legal advisor in the City Attorney's office as part of Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago's reform administration. For her work, it has been crucial to understanding how race theory, civil rights activism, politics, and human rights are interconnected. Throughout the creation of South Africa's first democratic constitution, she played a significant role in organizing a number of significant seminars that facilitated communication between American legal scholars and South African lawyers.
This work played a significant role in producing her acclaimed and influential article, “Whiteness as Property” (UCLA 2023).
On May 4, 1943, in New York City, Professor Charles R. Lawrence III was born. He attended the public schools in Spring Valley, New York, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1965 from Haverford College there in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He graduated with a J.D. in 1969 from Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut.
American professor and legal expert Charles R. Lawrence III. At the University of Hawaii at Mnoa Law School as of June 2022, he served as Centennial Professor and Emeritus Professor of Law. Critical racial theory, equal protection, and anti-discrimination law are some of Lawrence's specialties.
Lawrence was honored with numerous honors throughout his career, including the Most Distinguished Professor Award from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1978, the John Bingham Hurlburt Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the National Teaching Award from the Society of American Law Teachers in 2003. Nelson Mandela University, Georgetown University Law Center, and Haverford College all bestowed honorary doctorates to him in 2019 (historymakers 2023)
Professor Matsuda, a well-known author, and self-described activist in the academic community, is known for supporting the underdog. The Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, and Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review all identify her articles on hate speech, accent discrimination, and reparations as some of history's most frequently cited law review papers. Professor Matsuda is a well-known author and self-described scholar-activist known for supporting the underdog. She currently works at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. The Yale Law School librarian lists her pieces on hate speech (Michigan Law Review), accent discrimination (Yale Law Journal), and reparations (Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review) as some of the most often cited legal publications ever.
She discusses how racism and other forms of subordination influence law as a pioneer of critical race theory. From the left, right, and center, Professor Matsuda attracts attention nationwide. She was ranked as "one of the 100 most influential Asian Americans" by A Magazine and as "one of the 100 most dangerous professors in America" by a right-wing book due to her anti-war and feminist works (AAJC, 2023)
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a prominent figure in critical race
theory and an American civil rights activist, was born on May 5, 1959.
She teaches at the Columbia Law
School and UCLA School of Law and focuses on racial and gender issues.
The intersectional theory, which
focuses on how different social
identities, especially minority
identities are connected to distinct systems and structures of oppression, dominance, and discrimination is credited to Crenshaw.
She also incorporates intersectional feminism into her work, which is a related subfield to intersectional
theory. Intersectional feminism
focuses on analyzing the
interconnected systems of oppression
and discrimination that women encounter due to their race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic background (Farr 2023).
bottom of page