Defeat Fascism, Transform Democracy: Mapping Academic Resources, Reframing the Fundamentals, and Organizing for Collective Actions

The information we gathered during 2021–2023 shows that critical faculty and other academic resources are present throughout most of U.S. legal academia. Counting only full-time faculty, our limited research identified 778 contacts in 200 schools equating to nearly four contacts on average per school. But no organized critical “core” had coalesced within legal academia or, more broadly, throughout higher education expressly dedicated to defending and advancing critical knowledge and its production up to now. And yet, as the 2021–2022 formation of the Critical (Legal) Collective (“CLC”) outlined below demonstrates, many academics sense or acknowledge the need for greater cohesion among critical “tribes” and substantive disciplines.

Especially so now, when “the spirit of fascism here at home” in the U.S. is increasingly resurgent and propelling “the grave dangers of ‘rightist reaction’ in this Nation” against “liberal” law and equality values. Just as when Franklin D. Roosevelt warned this nation eighty years ago, today, the spirit of fascism and its racist, anti-democratic cosmology stands for the perpetual entrenchment in the U.S. of a settler identity caste system that enforces specific yet inter-connected supremacist ideologies of ignorance, convenience, and prejudice against society as a whole. In this pivotal historical moment, U.S. legal education, educators, and allies have chosen affirmatively to reject fascistic demands for submission, obeisance, and complicity. We have chosen instead to become a site of antisubordination resistance to this mounting reactionary violence and its ideological valorization of self-righteous ignorance, self-serving prejudice, and abject cruelty.

Responding to this moment while also carrying forward decades of critical work, this mapping project is dedicated to supporting the mobilization of proactive resistance and to the ultimate vindication of antisubordination values through critical knowledge, education, law, and action. This action is focused without fear or distraction on “establishing Justice” as the U.S. Constitution promised over two centuries ago.