The Miracle of the Black Leg : Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Law - Patricia J. Williams

The Miracle of the Black Leg

Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Law

By: Patricia J. Williams

Hardcover | 25 June 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover


$57.25

or 4 interest-free payments of $14.31 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 15 to 25 business days

Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist—aka the Mad Law Professor—tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more

Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.

With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers.

At the heart of “Wrongful Birth” is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child “comes out Black”; “Bodies in Law” explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And “Hot Cheeto Girl” examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny.

In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.

More in Literary Essays

We Should All be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

RRP $9.99

$8.90

11%
OFF
Griffith Review 87 : No Place Like Home - Carody Culver

RRP $27.99

$24.80

11%
OFF
Discourses and Selected Writings : Penguin Classics - Epictetus
The Prince : Penguin Pocket Hardbacks - Niccolo Machiavelli

RRP $14.99

$14.25

The Republic : Penguin Classics - Plato

RRP $17.99

$16.75

Love's Executioner - Irvin D. Yalom

RRP $22.99

$20.35

11%
OFF
The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Paperback

RRP $36.99

$29.75

20%
OFF
The Diary of a Young Girl : 70th Anniversary Edition - Anne Frank
The Anthropocene Reviewed : The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller - John Green
Tsunami : Women's Voices from Mexico - Heather Cleary
The Myth of Sisyphus : Penguin Modern Classics - Albert Camus

RRP $24.99

$22.50

10%
OFF
Against Interpretation and Other Essays : Penguin Modern Classics - Susan Sontag
Bluets - Maggie Nelson

Hardcover

RRP $22.99

$20.35

11%
OFF
Consider The Lobster : Essays and Arguments - David Foster Wallace

RRP $24.99

$20.50

18%
OFF