My work is heavily influenced by critiques that many critical intellectual traditions, especially Critical Race Theory, have made of reform projects focused on legal equality.

I am often talking about the ideas collected in Normal Life in contexts that are not academic, or that are full of people who are not primarily engaging as theorists or theory-readers. Being able to make ideas visual, especially critical ideas about movements that can be difficult to hear because of attachments we have to certain national narratives, or because of ways that we see ourselves, is especially useful.

I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems.

When we approach legal reform work, we can ask questions like: Will this provide actual relief to people facing violence or harm or will it primarily be a symbolic change? Will this divide our constituency by offering relief only to people with certain privileged statuses (such as people with lawful immigration status, people with jobs, married people, etc.)?

Legal doctrine requiring a showing of evidence of racist intent and a narrow chain of causation has made it very difficult to prove in court that a person or group is experiencing racism because the standards are too narrow and too focused on individual intentions.

Critical Race Theory offers a critique of how law and certain law reform strategies misunderstand the actual operation of life-shortening state violence, and how that has produced a set of reforms that fail to actually transform material conditions of white supremacy. These critiques redirect our attention to the conditions we aim to transform.

Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.