The Colonial Scholar: Do Outsider Authors Replicate the Citation Practices of the Insiders, But in Reverse?

Abstract

Part of a symposium issue on legal scholarship, this article addresses a question many have asked in the wake of my Imperial Scholar article in the Pennsylvania Law Review -- namely, do scholars of color behave in much the same way the imperial (white) scholars do, that is, citing each other and taking little note of writing by authors on the other side of the color line? I find that the answer is, in a word, no: minority scholars writing about race and civil rights cite white and non-white authors in numbers roughly proportionate to their representation in the relevant bodies of scholarship.

Keywords: legal scholarship, civil rights, legal writing, minorities, critical race theory, imperial scholarship, citation practices