Race, Crime, and the Law

There's no question that nowadays, racial issues pose one of the biggest obstacles to the fair workings of our criminal justice system, but exactly how these issues come into play and what to do about them is a subtler matter. In this book, Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor who is black, applies his precise command of the relevant legal language and legal background to explain and evaluate for the general reader various current ideas about how race is and should be involved in meting out criminal justice. His basic stance is that liberals and conservatives have more common ground on race and law than it seems at first, and that blacks have suffered more from being underprotected by law enforcement than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants, even though it is the latter allegation that seems to draw the most attention from those who view the courts through racial lenses.