Patricia Williams Chapter 1

Patricia Williams talks in Chapter 1 of her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights about the division of Law. She wants to eliminate the gap in the division in a way that closes the traditional division between theory and praxis. The arguments put forward by the Spanish Government in the case of Lecraft v. Spain go along the lines of what Williams wants to talk about in her book, the gaps created by the division in Law.

One of the arguments given by the Spanish Government in their defence is that the control on Ms. Lecraft was not a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, “Controlling illegal immigration is perfectly lawful and there is nothing in the Covenant to prevent police officers from carrying out identity

Spain, par. 4.3). this quote clearly associates the illegal immigrants to sub-Saharan African, generalizing that all people coming from there are coming in the country illegally. Therefore, there are instructions to control black people in Spain in order to identify the illegal immigrants. The quote “If one accepts the legitimacy of the control of illegal immigration by the State, then one must surely also accept that police checks carried out for that purpose, with due respect and a necessary sense of proportion, may take into consideration certain physical or ethnic characteristics as being a reasonable indication of a person’s non-Spanish origin” (Lecraft v. Spain, par. 4.3) explains why black people in particular are controlled for illegal immigration. According to this quote, the controls take into consideration the physical traits of a person, such as color of the skin, this being an indicator for illegal immigration. This can be seen as a generalization, as they assume that all black people in Spain can be regarded as illegal immigrants, thus making them the target of controls, without taking into consideration that black people can be Spaniards or that they immigrated legally in the

The way of knowing about the Law leaves out important aspects of the society, “legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem […] a paradigm of larger social perceptions that divide public from private, black from white, dispossessed from legitimate” (Williams, 1991, pp. 6-7). The quote explains the way in law many aspects of the social life, of reality, as left out. This division in Law leaves out important aspects that should be taken into consideration. Legal language can disguise important cultural, social, historical aspects that may affect the interpretation and the consequences of a legal decision or a law, by its way of “flattening” important topics. Therefore, the Law is not written in stone and aspects of reality should be taken into consideration. Law should be adapted to the context in which it is applied, thus taking context into consideration. Regarding the argument of the Spanish Government, the way the law is applied leaves out the reality of the matter and generalizes. Not all black people should be seen as illegal immigrants. The way they see them, based on a generalization, makes injustice to