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Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Law; subversive lawyering; criminal law; progressive prosecution
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Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Trying To Dismantle The Master’S House, And The Master Wouldn’T Let Them Anyway, Paul Butler
Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Trying To Dismantle The Master’S House, And The Master Wouldn’T Let Them Anyway, Paul Butler
Fordham Law Review
The first thing to note about Audre Lorde’s famous phrase “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is that it cannot literally be true. If tools can dismantle the master’s house, the master’s own tools would be good as anyone’s. The main problem would not be that the tools don’t work, but rather how to get them to the people who most need the master’s house dismantled—the enslaved ones. But the considerable work that the phrase does in social justice movements and critical theory is figurative rather than literal. It is usually intended as a rebuke of liberal …