I’m reflecting and trying to understand what happened on the AALS Business Associations listserv yesterday. I was away from my email for the day (which never happens!), but I came back to…well...a lot. Here’s my sense of what occurred and why it concerns me.

A business law prof asked for ideas on incorporating race and antiracism into corporate & securities law courses. It’s a question I’ve seen asked in many other doctrinal areas, and indeed the civ pro section had a great session on it in July. So I personally welcomed the inquiry.

Over the next day, there were 40+ messages related to this email. Many offered helpful ideas. But there was also many, many requests to unsubscribe from the listserv. (Note - the section leadership can't unsubscribe you, so those emails do nothing.)

I won’t speculate on any individual’s motivations for wanting to unsubscribe at that particular time, but I don’t recall ever seeing this type of mass exodus in the last 14 years of being a business law professor.

As a group, I hope we are willing to think deeply about the intersection of race (and gender and class and power) and the law, especially in the specific areas that we teach. We need to have these conversations with our students and with each other. They are important.

So I thought I would use this thread to catalog the great resources mentioned on the thread yesterday, as well as a few others.

First, one professor recommended Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. This professor stated that he uses excerpts from Chapter 4: “The New Deal for White America” in his classes. I love this book, @MehrsaBaradaran!

One professor recommended the article “Toward a Critical Corporate Law Pedagogy and Scholarship” by andré douglas pond cummings, Steven Ramirez, and Cheryl Wade here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2615142

Another professor recommend the case Castillo v. Case Farms of Ohio, which addresses migrant workers’ ability to use agency law to sue their employer for violations of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act. I teach this case and highly recommend it also!

One professor recommended the essay, “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson” by Nancy Fraser, which is available here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/685814

This blog post discusses incorporating critical perspectives into a contracts law course. Many BA profs also teach contracts, and there is overlap between the two subjects, so it’s a helpful resource. https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/contractsprof_blog/2020/07/just-a-link-before-i-go.html