Critical race theory is a movement and body of literature which evolved out of the critical legal studies movement in the US. Repairing the absence from critical legal studies of an analysis of how race and racialization are imbricated within legal doctrines and liberal legal frameworks was (and remains) a prime objective of critical race theory as it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Critical race theory offers analyses of the social and legal construction of race in a wide variety of contexts. Rather than taking ‘race’ as a given biological or natural category, critical race theorists take as their starting point the socially constructed nature of race. The ways in which law and legal apparatuses rely upon and further entrench socially constructed notions of race is a prime focus of critical race theory.
- Brenna Bhandar, "Critical Race Theory", in The New Oxford Companion to Law