New Legal Realism and Inequality

New Legal Realist methodologies afford comparative advantages in showing how law impacts people in their everyday lives and these methodologies sometimes can be especially helpful in increasing knowledge with respect to certain poorly understood and under-theorized legal issues implicating inequalities of one type or another. Further, scholars who use New Legal Realist methodologies can help build a bridge between scholarly understanding and policy change by revealing problems with the law that had not been previously recognized to any significant degree. At the same time, scholarship in and of itself rarely catalyzes legal reform but instead needs to be linked to a broader reform effort if a scholar would like to contribute to actual reform. Such broader reform efforts often involve coalition building, recruiting important stakeholders both from the bottom and the top, and a media strategy among other components. This chapter traces a line of development from research on African-American land loss through policy changes designed to put research knowledge into action, working to protect poor and minority property owners through empirically-informed legal change. This kind of translation of research on law into policy exemplifies the translation process at the heart of new legal realism