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Reclaiming the Intellectual

2019

Abstract

INTRODUCTION I was invited to deliver the September 2017 Dean's Lecture, on which this essay is based, in March of 2017, shortly after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45 th president of the United States. I had originally planned to present on one of my longstanding research areas, the intersections of contract law and critical race theory, but as the spring wore on, I began to feel an urgency about using my expertise to comment more directly on the increasingly overt but trenchant race, gender, sex, and class inequalities and conflicts that have plagued our nation for centuries. This sense of urgency was stoked by the intense summer of 2017, which brought us, among other things: the white supremacist, torchlight "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville-organized ostensibly to protest the city's plans to remove its Confederate monuments-during which thirty-four people were injured and three died, including 32-year-old Virginian, Heather Heyer (a white counter-protester killed by a Unite the Right marcher who drove his car into a crowd of which she was a part). 1 Additionally, two Virginia state troopers were killed in a helicopter crash