This reader is a collection of cases, materials, article excerpts (from law reviews, books, and non-legal sources), notes, commentaries and essays written by both authors. The author's primary goal is to enable students to read law critically with a special sensitivity to the ways in which legal techniques, rhetorical strategies, and legal practices reproduce patterns of power and privilege that subordinate people based on categories of identity. The materials are designed to reveal these strategies through close readings of the language and underlying assumptions in judicial opinions, to examine their similarities and differences across identity categories, and to compare then with insights garnered from the wide range of transdisciplinary scholarly excerpts surrounding the case text. After an introduction that describes the project as one of looking at the laboratory potential within notions like civil rights, the authors explain how their pedagogical approach of legal critique is designed to lead to student empowerment. The introduction closes with various readings about the role and power of law in society and on law as a potential instrument of social justice.