Patricia Williams

PATRICIA WILLIAMS is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University’s School of Law and a columnist for The Nation, where her “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” appears every other week. She practiced law as a deputy city attorney in the Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney and as a staff lawyer at the Western Center on Law and Poverty and she has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, City University of New York Law School, and Golden Gate University School of Law. Publishing widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing, her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights, The Rooster's Egg, and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. In the summer of 2000, she participated in the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, writing a performance piece she presented with the saxophonist Oliver Lake.

In her columns, books, and pieces for live performance, Patricia Williams brings a sharp analytic mind, an open heart, a leavening wit, and a graceful prose style to bear on the most pressing issues of the day. In her essays, the personal and political are not separate realms, but fluidly connected parts of a life lived in community, contemplation, and action. A prime example is her latest “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” column for the September 20 issue of The Nation, “Economic Bad Boys,” which comments on free-marketeers and Republican machismo:

“When the ‘scrawny boy from Austria’ delivered his peroration against faint-hearted "economic girlie men," it was an unusually seductive, even witty, appeal to a notion of free enterprise that is not just flexible but musclebound, not just robust but smackdown and not just strong but hypersteroidal. But the American free enterprise system, particularly since the Depression, has always rested on an assumption that the marketplace would be bounded by notions of fairness, reasonableness, rationality as well as efficiency. Recently, libertarian clichés and Republican oversimplifications seem to have left many people with the impression that commerce should be utterly unbounded by any kind of regulation whatsoever. This kind of thinking is littered with references to survival of the fittest, dogs eating dogs and snarling consumption of large quantities of red meat still bloody enough to spatter impressively. . . .

[Read the complete column ]

“My book, Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own, is already out in hardcover from Farrar Strauss & Giroux, and will be released in paperback in November from Picador. It’s a memoir of my family, going back to my grandparents. I wrote it because for a long time people have been saying there’s not sufficient interest in education in the Black community. I got so exasperated because every major civil rights lawsuit began with trying to get into schools and improve education. So it’s about my family’s struggle for education and their extraordinary success, which is a product of their striving and also, of course, of luck, of being in the right place at the right time.”

BBC News

Charles Burnett’s film, To Sleep with Anger

Andrea Levy’s Small Island

Harper’s Weekly Review

George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number

and

Buy a telescope and aim it at the sky, not your neighbor's window.

Get out of the house every day.

Shop daily for only the food you will eat in the next 24 hours or so.

Consult at least two different news sources–print sources, not TV–a day.

Keep a diary.