Abstract
This article presents a critical race theory-inflected history of the U.S. judicial opinion and conceptualizes the emergence of a new form: the Black Lives Matter judicial opinion. Since the Black Lives Matter movement’s inception in 2013, legal scholars have unearthed the racist intellectual history of several doctrinal fields, but the intellectual history of the judicial opinion itself as a genre at the discipline’s core has been less scrutinized. Drawing on archival research and scholarship about the politics of legal canon formation, I argue that canonical U.S. Supreme Court opinions often fail to engage meaningfully with race. Moreover, scholarly canons tend to venerate white judges’ opinions as exemplars, and curricular canons frequently elide racial considerations. As a result, the judicial opinion remains a quintessential “white space.”
Keywords
Almas Khan, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter Judicial Opinion