It’s paternalistic to deny victims of horrible crimes needed relief in the name of future revolutions
Richard Delgado 9 Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590, https://scholarship.law.ua.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1461&context=fac_articles
2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby mntaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be what we want.