With her trademark elegant prose and critical theory wisdom, Professor Patricia Williams offers an expansive and deeply humane lens in a new collection of essays, The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (The New Press, 2024), that explores the tricky places where history, law and identity collide. “I spend a great deal of time thinking about the body as property,” writes Williams, “wondering to what extent any of us are truly ‘autonomous’ rather than just interconnected puzzle bits of each other. Do we have anything like a considered ethic of care for how we borrow, attach, lean on, fit together, abandon the pieces of one another?”

Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, literature and law. Her pathbreaking books, including The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991), illustrate some of the United States’ most complex societal problems and challenge our ideas about socio-legal constructs of race and gender. Her work remains at the cutting edge of legal scholarship. Drawing on her prior interrogations of race, gender and personhood, Williams’ current research raises core questions of individual autonomy and identity in the context of legal and ethical debates on science and technology. Her work in the area of health and genetics, for example, questions how racial formation is shaped by the legal regulation of private industry and government. Her work on algorithms grapples with the auditing function of technology in our everyday lives that reshapes our understanding of who we are.

With The Miracle of the Black Leg, Williams opens another treasure chest of breathtaking historical and contemporary detail.

— Anna Deavere Smith