Richard T. Ford

"Since the 1960s, ideas developed during the civil rights movement have been astonishingly successful in fighting overt discrimina&shy;tion and prejudice. But how successful are they at combating the whole spectrum of social injustice--including conditions that aren't directly caused by bigotry? How do they stand up to segregation, for instance--a legacy of racism, but not the direct result of ongoing discrimina&shy;tion? It's tempting to believe that civil rights litigation can combat these social ills as efficiently as it has fought blatant discrimination.  In Rights Gone Wrong, Richard Thompson Ford, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Race Card, argues that this is seldom the case. Civil rights do too much and not enough: opportunists use them to get a competitive edge in schools and job markets, while special-interest groups use them to demand special privileges. Extremists on both the left and the right have hijacked civil rights for personal advantage. Worst of all, their theatrics have drawn attention away from more seri&shy;ous social injustices.  Ford, a professor of law at Stanford University, shows us the many ways in which civil rights can go terribly wrong. He examines newsworthy lawsuits with shrewdness and humor, proving that the distinction between civil rights and personal entitlements is often anything but clear. Finally, he reveals how many of today's social injustices actually can't be remedied by civil rights law, and demands more creative and nuanced solutions. In order to live up to the legacy of the civil rights movement, we must renew our commitment to civil rights, and move beyond them"--

"How successful is civil rights law in battling social injustice?"--

how legal entitlements undermine social justice and social harmony

Rights gone wrong

Sheila R. Foster

David B. Oppenheimer

Sora Y. Han

This revised and updated casebook comprehensively compares the U.S. legal approach to problems of inequality and discrimination with the approaches of a variety of other legal systems around the world.

Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, Third Edition

What is black culture? Does it have an essence? What do we lose and gain by assuming that it does, and by building our laws accordingly? This bold and provocative book questions the common presumption of political multiculturalism that social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are defined by distinctive cultural practices. Richard Ford argues against law reform proposals that would attempt to apply civil rights protections to "cultural difference." Unlike many criticisms of multiculturalism, which worry about "reverse discrimination" or the erosion of core Western cultural values, the book's argument is primarily focused on the adverse effects of multicultural rhetoric and multicultural rights on their supposed beneficiaries. In clear and compelling prose, Ford argues that multicultural accounts of cultural difference do not accurately describe the practices of social groups. Instead these accounts are prescriptive: they attempt to canonize a narrow, parochial, and contestable set of ideas about appropriate group culture and to discredit more cosmopolitan lifestyles, commitments, and values. The book argues that far from remedying discrimination and status hierarchy, "cultural rights" share the ideological presuppositions, and participate in the discursive and institutional practices, of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Ford offers specific examples in support of this thesis, in diverse contexts such as employment discrimination, affirmative action, and transracial adoption. This is a major contribution to our understanding of today's politics of race, by one of the most distinctive and important young voices in America's legal academy.

Richard T. Ford

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