Race, Ethnicity, and the Legal Profession

Hilary Sommerlad Angela Melville Lisa Hanson Sameer Ashar Meera Deo Marijke Ter Voert Hilary Sommerlad The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has underlined the extent to which we inhabit a ‘racialised  … world in which material and symbolic resources continue to be deeply unequally distributed’ (Hall 2006) . BLM has also highlighted the pivotal role of law generally, not just the criminal justice system, in producing and sustaining that racialised world (Akbar 2018; Butler 2016: 1458–66) . Law’s conceptual categories and schema inform the construction, communication, and interpretation of social relations (Silbey 2005) , enacting and legitimating the unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources. Yet the law is also a site of struggle and source of the tools for challenging archetypal cultural categories – while determining the terms of contestation (Merry 1995: 20) . This double-sided and hence indeterminate character of law, which operates on an ‘ethical, emotional or...