Randall Kennedy

Randall LeRoy Kennedy (born September 10, 1954) is an American legal scholar.

He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life.

He specializes in contracts, freedom of expression, race relations law, civil rights legislation, and the Supreme Court.

Kennedy has written seven books: Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption; Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word; Race, Crime, and the Law; Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal; The Persistence of the Color Line; For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law; and Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture.

Kennedy has also published several collections of shorter works.

Randall LeRoy Kennedy was born on September 10, 1954, in Columbia, South Carolina, the middle child of Henry Kennedy Sr., a postal worker, and Rachel Kennedy, an elementary school teacher.

He has two siblings, Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., a former United States District Court Judge for the District of Columbia, and Angela Kennedy, a lawyer at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.

Kennedy has said that tales of racial oppression and racial resistance were staples of conversation in his household.

His father often spoke of watching Thurgood Marshall argue Rice vs. Elmore, the case that invalidated the rule permitting only whites to vote in South Carolina's Democratic primary.

Later that decade, fleeing the abuses of Jim Crow, his parents moved to Washington, D.C.

Kennedy attended St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in history from Princeton University in 1977 after completing an 135-page long senior thesis, "Richard Hofstadter: The Historian as Social Critic."

He then studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1977 to 1979 and at Yale Law School, where he received a J.D. in 1982.

Kennedy served as an editor for the Yale Law Journal.

He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1982–83 and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court in 1983-84.

He was admitted to the Washington, D.C. bar in 1983.

He is a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Philosophical Society.

In 1984 Kennedy joined the faculty at Harvard Law School, teaching courses on race, law, and freedom of expression.

He first came to prominence as a legal-academic scholar when he began addressing affirmative action.

In 1997, Kennedy published Race, Crime, and the Law, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1998.

"This book is a brave, honest, forceful intervention in that debate", wrote William A. Galston and David Wasserman in the Wilson Quarterly, adding, "With restrained passion, he documents the myriad ways in which our legal system has betrayed the principle of fair and equal treatment for African Americans."

Kennedy argues in the book that African Americans have suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system, but also claims that blacks have committed a "notably large proportion" of the crimes that people are most afraid of (robbery, rape, murder, aggravated assault).

He likewise argues that the need to protect black communities from crime has often been neglected.

Galston and Wasserman wrote, "Too often, says Kennedy, black leaders show more concern for black perpetrators of crime than for their black victims."

Kennedy is known as unafraid to tackle socially difficult issues, such as racism.

He has written for academic and popular journals, published several books, and served on the editorial boards of the magazines American Prospect and The Nation.

Kennedy has written extensively on interracial marriages and adoptions, and on the relationship between race and crime.

His views have garnered acclaim and controversy.

"One of the things they [critics] find disconcerting is that I ask questions", Kennedy told Lawrence Donegan in the London Observer.

"I actually question the premise of my own thinking and push my own conclusions hard. I thought that was what intellectuals were supposed to do."

Despite the firestorm created by Kennedy's published work, Donegan said that Kennedy's "colleagues variously describe him as brilliant, well-read and personable."

Kennedy is a staunch defender of freedom of speech, stating "a speech-protective culture—a culture that defends even ugly expression—benefits minority communities, that depend upon protest to make their presence and their preferences seen and heard."

In 2002, controversy erupted when Kennedy published Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.

"The power of 'Nigger,'" Charles Taylor wrote in Salon, "is that Kennedy writes fully of the word, neither condemning its every use nor fantasizing that it can ever become solely a means of empowerment."

In the book, Kennedy explores the word's history, and how its meaning varies according to the context of its use.

"I'm not saying that any particular instance of using the N-word is any more horrifying and menacing than any other such word", he told Daniel Smith in The Atlantic.

"I am saying that from a broad sociological view, the word is associated with more havoc in American society than other racial slurs."

In Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption (2003), Kennedy attempts to bring greater understanding to the racial issues that continue to trouble American society.

"His premise is based on common sense", wrote Emily Bernard in Black Issues Book Review.

"Until Americans confront racial bias in the most intimate arenas of their lives, we will continue to live with racism and its consequences."

Unlike many black intellectuals, Kennedy supports interracial adoption.