| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Delaney. Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1998. Pp. x, 229. Cloth $35.00, paper $17.95.

This volume posits the melding of two seemingly incongruous concepts, geography and law, in shaping social relations in the United States. Geography occupied a central position in the history of black-white interaction because much of the nation's racial tension has stemmed from conflict over space. In what he terms geographies of race and racism, David Delaney argues the importance of spatial control in the nineteenth-century debate over fugitive slave laws and in the twentieth-century conflict over racially segregated urban neighborhoods. Each is an example of "the politics of black mobility" wherein the conflict over race revolved around African-American people challenging spatial restrictions imposed on them. 1

Relatedly, Delaney illustrates the prominent role of the legal system in maintaining racial subordination by controlling space. Here he analyzes the complex legal arguments that evolved in a series of court cases, focusing on the legal reasoning in these cases rather than their outcomes or interpretation. Drawing on the work of critical legal scholars such as Robert Gordon and Gary Peller, Delaney argues persuasively that legal discourse, the constellation of social relations conceptualized in the language of law, is not simply, as conventional legal theorists would suggest, neutral, objective, and non-political. It is instead a rendering of judgement and justice grounded in accepted understandings about meaning and language advanced by social elites, and it is inherently political. Moreover, legal discourse suppresses other modes of discourse and distorts representations of social life by imposing sterile legal descriptions. If legal discourse translates into social reality, then, according to Delaney, much is lost in translation. . . .

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