The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law

by Patricia J. Williams

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 non-normative 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Essays, Politics, Race, Science, Audiobook

256 pages, Hardcover

Published June 25, 2024

About the author

Patricia J. Williams is an American legal scholar and a proponent of critical race theory.

Reviews

[ancientreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patricia Williams is professor emerita of contract law at Columbia, but "contract" as casually understood is too narrow to indicate the scope of her thinking here. Think about transactions versus reciprocity, about what's for sale versus what can only be given, about the collision of individual freedom (of risk-taking; of speech; of religion) with the public good.

The cover illustration depicts a black leg transplanted onto a white man; he's attended by two doctors, while the one-legged black man, the "donor," lies on the floor in the foreground, a body useful for its parts. I'm reminded of Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told, a history of slavery's essential contributions to the growth of a capitalist world economy: Baptist takes the imagery of enslaved people's body parts as his starting point for each chapter. "Hands," for instance, meaning enslaved laborers, functioned as a way of attributing the labor of the enslaved to the people who owned them, rather than to the laborers themselves ("I own fifty hands," let's say). Williams's first chapter considers a case in which a man's amputated leg, which he had preserved, wound up being sold along with the other contents of the storage container he'd failed to pay rent for. Did the leg belong to the woman who bought the container's contents, or was it still legally or morally or naturally his?

These essays attend to the dignitarian body -- the body as synecdoche for a person with unalienable rights; to the fungible, saleable body; to the excluded or included body or person; to the body that is acted upon and the body that acts. All this oversimplifies; I'd have to read the book again to give a halfway adequate account of its perspectives and its insights.

Highly recommended, especially if read alongside Baptist's book and George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison's Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Many thanks to the New Press and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Elena K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Williams writes exactly as she teaches: brilliantly and critically but with equal amounts of humor and generosity. These essays are so special and gave me the same feeling as when I read The Alchemy of Race and Rights for the first time - that the prospect of a life in law+art+teaching is not only bearable but aspirational.

[Briana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and The New Press for the ARC of The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law by Patricia J. Williams in exchange for an honest review. I feel awkward giving this a rating because it's honestly a 3.5 for me and I don't want this to seem like a bad book because it's not. These are well-written and researched essays on the human body, law, and race. I learned so many interesting and crazy things in this book. So much of the insane laws on the human body can go back to slavery which proves that American Slavery is a necessary subject to teach students in school because it reveals a lot about law enforcement, society, race, and science. This loses me because it feels like reading a textbook and it's not that entertaining. For someone who likes to read for enjoyment while also learning new things, that's an issue for me. It's a 3.5 because it could easily go between a 4 and a 3. It's not something I would recommend for a casual read or if you're curious. It's a handy book if someone is studying Critical Race Theory though.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more like 3.5 stars, sorry to quibble. I thought there would be something like an in-depth case breakdown or illustration of the contract law vs. constitutional law tensions that are the core of the book from each angle, but it ended up more like legal musings and essays.

[Kylie Connatser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow—this was intense. Thought-provoking, heartbreaking, and at times filled me with rage and disbelief at the horrors people inflict on others simply because they see them as “other.” The insidious nature of racism—how it permeates every aspect of life, even now—is something we know, but rarely confront in full. As a white woman, this was a necessary and uncomfortable read. I’m not blind to the microaggressions POC face daily, but this book was a slap in the face reminder of how little has truly changed over time. Williams presents deeply disturbing truths through a sharp, critical lens that somehow makes them digestible—without ever softening their impact. A tough but essential read.

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most well written books I have read this year by the Nations columnist and Columbia law professor Patricia J. Williams. She is a proponent of critical race theory which has been hotly contested by the right wing media (with very little understanding of the concept). The book contains several essays on the history of racism and the author’s family history. It’s interesting to me that the people who insist that racism doesn’t exist are the same people who demonstrate that exact behavior.

[Hdonner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought as my Bookgroup picked this book it sounded interesting, about a man using a black amputated on a white man. I thought maybe a mystery, thriller, medical experimentation, religious or medieval story. It was none of these. It was a college professor/ lawyer musings, hard intellectual thinking where I became lost even though I hold my own advanced college degree. I think a more cohesive theme would help but I’m sorry I just didn’t get it

[John P. Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patricia J. Williams, who writes for the Nation, a publication to which I subscribe and read regularly, is a contracts law scholar. In this, she writes in assorted essays persuasively about race, identity, and the law. The Miracle of the Black Leg is interesting and a book I recommend.

[˖ ࣪ ‹ seri ; ⁺ ⸝⸝ · Rating 3 out of 5]

review soon !

[Claire Dow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Work read. Forthcoming article if you really want to know!!!!

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This book is kind of like if bell hooks wrote about court cases sometimes

[Hayden Fuchino · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful, intelligent read from Professor Williams on the role of law, culture, and social forces in defining, dismembering, remembering, and reconstructing race and human bodies.

[flora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always, always an incisive thinker and lucid writer.