Americans Without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship

by Mark S. Weiner

Overview

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls “juridical racialism.” The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group and, in turn, Americans as a whole by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814793657
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2008
Pages:	205
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Mark S. Weiner is Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law, Newark. He is the author of Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste, winner of the American Bar Association's 2005 Silver Gavel Award.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction	1
1	Laws of Development, Laws of Land	22
2	Teutonic Constitutionalism and the Spanish-American War	51
3	The Biological Politics of Japanese Exclusion	81
4	Culture, Personality, and Racial Liberalism	107
	Conclusion	131
	Notes	135
	Index	185
	About the Author	197

What People are Saying About This

John Brigham

"Juridical racialism is legal rhetoric infused with Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and Weiner shows how it operated from the Gilded Age to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Reading the news, one wonders if it is not still operating today."
—University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Christine Harrington

"A rich and exceptionally clear account of the meaning-making context and constitution of citizenship."
—Institute for Law and Society, New York University

Peter Goodrich

"Mark Weiner provides a rare and radical insight into the racial structures of American law. Reading this racial history through the rhetoric of case law decisions--juridical racialism--provides a dramatic sense of the anthropological scope of what law has done and potentially continues to do."
—Cardozo School of Law

Peter Fitzpatrick

"An enthralling mixture of personages and cases that reveals much about the intimate combining of law and 'American' imperialism, including the complicities of scholarship."
—Birkbeck School of Law, University of London

Editorial Reviews

"A rich and exceptionally clear account of the meaning-making context and constitution of citizenship."

Christine Harrington

"Mark Weiner provides a rare and radical insight into the racial structures of American law. Reading this racial history through the rhetoric of case law decisionsjuridical racialismprovides a dramatic sense of the anthropological scope of what law has done and potentially continues to do."

Peter Goodrich

"An enthralling mixture of personages and cases that reveals much about the intimate combining of law and American imperialism, including the complicities of scholarship."

Peter Fitzpatrick

"It addresses a powerful topic. It is a conceptually creative piece of scholarship, forged from a sophisticated interdisciplinary viewpoint."

The Law and Politics Book Review

"Commendably and profoundly, the author maps the numerous uncharted waters of racial discrimination showing how anthropology and culture intermix with law to form wide-ranging and lasting policies of exclusion."

New York Law Review