Regina Austin

Regina Austin

Overview

* Professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania
* Proponent of critical race theory
* Anti-capitalist
* Views America as a nation awash in racism
* Believes that (nonwhite) minority status confers the privilege of interpreting the law as one pleases


Regina Austin holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester (1970) and a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1973), where she has been employed as a law professor since 1977. Austin is a proponent of critical race theory, a scholarly tradition that views white racism as a permanent aspect of American life and thus favors compensatory, race-based preferences for blacks in the realms of employment and higher education. UPenn Law School describes Professor Austin as “a leading authority on economic discrimination and minority legal feminism,” and as an expert on “the overlapping burdens of race, gender, and class oppression in traditional legal scholarship.” In addition to her teaching duties, Austin since 2005 has also served as director of the Penn Program on Documentaries & the Law, a “social justice” initiative that trains law students “to become producers and directors of visual legal advocacy … pieces” created on behalf of capital defendants.

A longtime, outspoken advocate of racial separatism—particularly as an antidote to the supposedly continuing oppression of black Americans—Austin has made cultural and ethnic discord a central theme of her courses, which consider legal issues through the prism of identity politics. As author David Horowitz points out in his 2006 book The Professors, one of Austin’s seminars—“Advanced Torts: Intentional Torts and the Intersection of Race, Gender & Class”—examines, in the words of the course description, “the law of intentional torts from the perspective of intergroup and intragroup conflict.” This seminar teaches students to analyze legal disputes “from the perspective of groups of subordinate status,” a category that Austin subdivides into “race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or class.” In short, “Advanced Torts” encourages students—especially nonwhite minorities—to regard the law not as a body of rules applicable equally to all citizens, but rather as an infinitely malleable concept subordinate to one’s perceived identity. Moreover, students are taught that minority status confers the privilege of interpreting the law as one pleases. “I rely fairly heavily on culture as being the base on which you begin to build so that your authorities come from the culture and not outside of the culture,” said Austin in an October 1999 interview with the Legal Oral History Project, explaining that minority communities require an “alternative source of authority.”

In City Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald points out that Austin, in her published articles, has exhorted African Americans to reject the distinction between lawful and unlawful activity as the imposed strictures of an overbearing white power structure. Asserting that “the black community should embrace the criminals within its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression,” Austin regards “conformity to law” as one of those “traditional values” that often “intensif[y] divisions within the black community.” Thus she countenances certain types of illegal “hustling” that, by her own telling, occupy the “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.” Such relatively harmless hustlers, Austin explains, include “clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.”

In a similar spirit of rebellion against traditional mores, notes Mac Donald, Austin has argued in favor of unwed teen pregnancy, on grounds that it represents an “attempt to break out of the rigid economic, social, and political categories that a racist, sexist, and class-stratified society would impose” on poor black girls. Austin also has characterized prostitution as an “exciting job in a public sphere,” and she has chastised those who would assume that black streetwalkers “have nothing to teach us, such as how to identify and deal with pimps.”

Similar notions of anti-white animus coupled with a reverence for black exceptionalism, govern Austin’s work as a professor. Asked in an October 1999 interview to describe how she viewed her role as a legal scholar, Austin answered that it “should start with the premise that black people are at the center of the universe and go on from there.” This perspective, Austin explained, was the “common characteristic of the body of scholarship that is classified as critical race studies.”

A salient feature of Austin’s courses is their promotion of an aggressively political agenda in preference to scholarly objectivity. Such is the case with her “Environmental Racism” seminar, which grafts Austin’s views on race with her commitment to “the environmental justice movement.” As David Horowitz reports in The Professors, the official course description of Austin’s seminar acknowledges that it has a political agenda, among whose aims are “supporting the environmental racism claim,” championing “environmental/occupational health issues such as pesticide poisoning and sweatshop conditions,” and “protecting biodiversity.”

Austin gives voice to the Marxist core of critical race theory when she laments, in her interview with the Legal Oral History Project, that minorities and the poor inhabit “lesser quality environments” as a result of the way that “resources are removed from access by the market.” Her proposed solution is wholesale wealth redistribution—which she depicts as “a restoration of the public interest in private wealth”—in order to “produc[e] privatization or quasi-privatization for people who are the least well off.” Toward this end, Austin sees the law as a “useful … supplement to activism”—a sentiment that squares neatly with Austin’s conception of herself as a professor-activist: “I’m an institutional actor,” she says.

Austin was a focal point of nationwide controversy in 1990, when she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. At that time, Harvard professor Derrick Bell—explaining that black female law students were in desperate need of “role models” like Austin—issued a “non-negotiable demand” that the school hire her as a tenured faculty member. When Harvard would not cave to Bell’s pressure, the professor protested by taking a leave of absence from his teaching post.

For additional information on Regina Austin, click here.

Additional Resources:


Further Reading: “Regina Austin” (Law.UPenn.edu, Scholarship.Law.UPenn.edu, LinkedIn.com); “Professor Regina Austin” The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (by David Horowitz, 2006); “Transcript of Interview with Professor Regina Austin” (Legal Oral History Project, Law.UPenn.edu, 10-21-1999); Law School Humbug” (By Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Autumn 1995).

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