Williams, Patricia Joyce

August 28, 1951

Patricia Joyce Williams is a leading scholar on race, class, gender, and the law. One of the pioneers of critical race theory, she has distinguished herself as an incisive commentator and a public intellectual. Williams has stated that she is "trying to create a genre of legal writing to fill the gaps of traditional legal scholarship." She does so by using narrative, literary theory, philosophy, history, and anecdote to superb effect. She writes engagingly and uses popular events and masterful storytelling to delve into complex and important legal and social issues.

Williams began teaching at the Columbia Law School in 1991, eventually earning the position of James L. Dohr Professor of Law. Prior to entering Columbia she practiced law as a consumer advocate and deputy city attorney for Los Angeles, and as a staff attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty. A graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, Williams has taught at a number of institutions, including Golden Gate University, the City University of New York, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard University, and Stanford University.

In Williams's first book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (1991), she discusses a range of cases, events, and personal experiences in order to unveil the politics behind abstracted legal language, and she eloquently argues on behalf of rights and redemptive measures for those traditionally marginalized in American law. For this work she received numerous distinctions, such as the National Association of Black Political Scientists Book Award. The book was named one of the twenty-five best books of 1991 by the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

Williams followed with two other critically acclaimed books, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (1995) and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997). In The Rooster's Egg, she explores the range of social forces that allow racial prejudice to persist. In Seeing a Color-Blind Future, a book based upon the Reith Lectures she gave at the British Broadcasting Corporation, she challenges the law's literal mandates of color-blindness for their obfuscation of the very color prejudices individuals seek to remediate.

Williams' scholarly contributions are matched by her status as a public intellectual. She is a contributing editor and columnist writing on current legal, gender, and race issues for Nation magazine. In addition to law review articles, she has written for publications as varied as the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, and USA Today. She has appeared on a number of television and radio shows, including All Things Considered and Fresh Air (NPR), NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), and the Today Show (NBC), as well as international radio and television programs.

While challenging the boundaries of traditional legal scholarship, Williams has made observations that are compelling to a wide spectrum of readers both within and beyond the legal profession. She is consistently one of the fifty most cited professors in law review articles. She has been the recipient of various prestigious fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and she has been awarded a number of honorary doctorates.

See also Critical Race Theory; Intellectual Life

Bibliography

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Williams, Patricia. The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Williams, Patricia. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. New York: Noonday Press, 1998.

imani perry (2005)