Barbara Flagg, Professor of Law Emerita, whose scholarship helped shape conversations around race, equality, and constitutional interpretation, has died.
Flagg was a leading voice in constitutional law, critical race theory, federal jurisdiction, and jurisprudence. At WashU Law, she introduced into the curriculum courses in critical jurisprudence and seminars examining social justice, white privilege, and sexuality and the law. Her classroom teaching and scholarship challenged students and colleagues to interrogate legal structures and the ways race and identity operate within them.
Flagg’s article, Was Blind, But Now I See, which was published in 1993 and later developed into a book in 1998, was a cutting-edge piece and a landmark in the field of white racial consciousness and the law. Flagg identified the “transparency phenomenon,” which is best described as the invisibility of whiteness to white people. Flagg wrote that whites have the unique option not to think about whiteness and that “whites appear to pursue that option so habitually that it may be a defining characteristic of whiteness: To be white is not to think about it.” Flagg’s critical examination of white privilege prompted calls for doctrinal reforms to address institutional racism and provide greater equality of opportunity to persons of all races.
Her research focused on issues of race proportionality, diversity, white racial consciousness, and Title VII. Professor Flagg’s work remains widely cited and continues to influence legal scholars and practitioners engaged in questions of equality and the law.
Before joining WashU Law, Professor Flagg taught at two universities in California, where she led philosophy courses in logic, critical thinking, and ethics. After earning her law degree, she clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, prior to Ginsburg’s appointment to the United States Supreme Court.
WashU Law will remember Barbara and her work with short tributes in the WashU Journal of Law & Policy. Steven Gunn, WashU Law Adjunct Professor; Patricia Cain, Professor of Law at Santa Clara Law; Monica Allen, a former student and until recently WashU’s General Counsel, and Susan Appleton, WashU Law Lemma Barkeloo & Phoebe Couzins Professor of Law, will each author a tribute.
