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.

A scholarly dissection of the legal injustices and lack of bodily autonomy that Black people have been subjected to by the Western legal system. The collection of essays shows how the law has been set up to question Black peoples' rights to their independent mobility (the missing leg), reproduction (sperm donors) and ownership of genetic identity (DNA).

I have studied critical race theory in the past, and I can definitely see this being an assigned reading for certain topics we covered in that class. I do think it was much more academic than I anticipated, which is fantastic but just not what I expected. I dipped in and out of the essays for that reason. I do think it is an interesting read for those looking for a good dose of theory alongside real-life case studies and examples.

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.