Official Website of Daria Roithmayr

Daria Roithmayr
Daria Roithmayr

Daria Roithmayr teaches and writes about the dynamics of racial inequality, and in particular the persistence of structural disparities in labor, housing, political participation, wealth and education. Her recent book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage (NYU 2014), explores the self-reinforcing dynamics of persistent racial inequality. Her work is heavily interdisciplinary, drawing from economics, sociology, political theory, history and complex systems theory. She joined USC Gould in fall 2006.

Before joining USC Gould, Professor Roithmayr taught for nine years at the University of Illinois College of Law. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. She has also been a visiting law professor at the University of Michigan, Georgetown, and Yale. Among her representative publications are the forthcoming "Should Law Keep Pace With Society? An Evolutionary Game Theory Approach" (working paper); "Evolutionary Dynamics and the Economic Analysis of Law" (Elgar Encyclopedia of Law and Economics (T. Ulen ed. 2014); and "Critical Race Theory Meets Social Science" 10 Ann. Rev. Law and Social Science 149 (2014).

Professor Roithmayr received her B.S. from UCLA, and her J.D., magna cum laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a member of Order of the Coif and served as senior notes editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. She clerked for The Honorable Marvin J. Garbis, judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

Legal scholar Daria Roithmayr provocatively argues that racial inequality lives on because white advantage functions as a powerful self-reinforcing monopoly, reproducing itself automatically from generation to generation even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Drawing on work in antitrust law and a range of other disciplines, Roithmayr brilliantly compares the dynamics of white advantage to the unfair tactics of giants like AT&T and Microsoft. With penetrating insight, Roithmayr locates the engine of white monopoly in positive feedback loops that connect the dramatic disparity of Jim Crow to modern racial gaps in jobs, housing and education.

Press
August 20th, 2014
Slate
February 2nd, 2014
Salon

Labor pains: The racist policies that set workplace equality back decades

August 26th, 2014
MSNBC

All In with Chris Hayes: The conservative fight against tyranny

January 20th, 2014
The Huffington Post

Scholarship & Teaching

Teaching:

Critical Race Theory Syllabus
June, 2021

Class Assignments:
  • The Cat and Mouse of Getting Around the Law
  • 1619 Project
  • Al Jazeera, The Long Repressed History of Black Leftism
  • Bell, Brown v Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma
  • Carbardo and Gulati, The Law and Economics of Critical Race Theory
  • Coates, The Case for Reparations
  • Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics
  • Crenshaw, Race, Reform, Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law
  • Derrida, Politics and Friendship, A Discussion with Jacques Derrida
  • Epstein, Legal Education and the Politics of Exclusion
  • Farber and Sherry, Distorting Public Discourse
  • Ford, The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis
  • Freeman, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine
  • Gotanda, A Critique of Our Constitution is Color Blind
  • Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory
  • Harris, Whiteness as Property
  • Hutchinson, "Gay Rights" for "Gay Whites"?: Race, Sexual Identity, and Equal Protection Discourse
  • Jones, The Social Construction of Race
  • Kang, Trojan Horses of Race
  • Kennedy, A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative Action in Legal Academia
  • Lopez, Race Ethnicity Erasure - The Salience of Race to LatCrit Theory
  • Matsuda, We Will Not Be Used
  • Montoya, Mascaras y Trenzas
  • Peller, Race Consciousness
  • Peller, Reason and the Mob: The Politics of Representation
  • Posner, The Skin Trade
  • Prashad, Anti-D'Souza-The Ends of Racism and the Asian American
  • Rankine, The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning
  • Roberts, The Social and Moral Costs of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities
  • Roithmayr, Reproducing Racism, Introduction
  • Russell, Lesbian, Gay And Bisexual Rights and "The Civil Rights Agenda"
  • Tushnet, An Essay on Rights
  • Tushnet, The Degradation of Constitutional Discourse
  • Taylor, From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation
  • United States Departmentof Justice, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department
  • Volpp, Civility and the Undocumented Alien
  • Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
Articles:
  • Evolutionary Dynamics Theory and Empirical Method
    Methodologies of Law and Economics (Thomas Ulen ed. Elgar forthcoming 2017)
    2017
  • The Dynamics of Excessive Force
    2016 U Chicago Legal Forum 407
    2016
  • Should Law Keep Pace with Society? Relative Update Rates Determine the Co-Evolution of
    Institutional Punishment and Citizen Contributions to Public Goods

    6 Games 124 (2015) (with Alex Isakov and David Rand)
    June 2015
  • Critical Race Theory Meets Social Science
    Annual Review of Law and Social Science
    August 2014
  • The Flaw at the Heart of The Triple Package
    Slate
    February 2014
  • The Numbers Don't Lie
    Huffington Post
    January 2014
  • Critical Race Theory Meets Social Science
    ANNUAL REV. L. SOCIAL SCI. (With Devon Carbado)
    Forthcoming 2014
  • Faking It
    Reviewing Nancy Leon, Racial Capitalism, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 2151 (2013), JOTWELL
    September 2013
  • Poverty, Prisons and Power
    Reviewing Ian Haney Lopez, Post-Racial Racialism, 98 CAL. L. REV. 1023 (2010), JOTWELL
    October 2012
  • Lessons From Mazibuko: Shifting From Rights to the Commons
    2010(3) CONSTITUTIONAL COURT REVIEW 317 (Peer Reviewed South African Journal)
    2010
  • Racial Cartels
    16 MICH. J. RACE AND LAW 45
    2010
  • Them That Has, Gets
    27 MISS. C. L. REV. 373
    2007-08
  • A Dangerous Supplement
    55 J. LEGAL ED. 80 (Review-Essay Reviewing Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Racial Hierarchy)
    2005
  • Locked In Segregation
    12 VA. J. SOCIAL POLICY AND LAW 197
    2004
  • Tacking Left: A Radical Critique of Grutter
    21 CONST. COMMENT. 191
    2004
  • Locked In Inequality: The Persistence of Discrimination
    9 MICH. J. RACE AND LAW 31
    2003
  • Access, Adequacy, and Equality: The Constitutionality of School Fee Financing in Public Education
    19 SOUTH AFR. J. HUM. RTS. 382
    2003
  • Easy for You to Say: An Essay on Outsiders, the Usefulness of Reason, and Radical Pragmatism
    57 UMIAMI L. REV. 939
    2003
  • A Bad Subject
    9 CARDOZO WOMEN'S L. J. 501
    2003
  • Direct Measures: An Alternative Affirmative Action Program for Law Schools
    7 MICH. J. RACE AND LAW 1 (Lead Article)
    2001
  • Left(Over) Rights
    22 CARDOZO L. REV. 1113
    2001
  • Left Over Rights: Are Rights Still Useful After the Critique of Indeterminacy?
    JOURNAL OF LAW, TEXT AND CULTURE (Austin Sarat and Penny Pether, eds.)
    2001
  • Barriers to Entry: A Market Lock-in Model of Discrimination
    86 VIRGINIA L. REV. 727
    2000
  • Barriers to Entry: A Market Lock-in Model of Discrimination
    86 VIRGINIA L. REV. 727
    2000
  • "Gay Rights" for "Gay Whites"?: Race, Sexual Identity, and Equal Protection Discourse
    Cornell Law Review
    1998
  • Deconstructing the Distinction Between Bias and Merit
    85 CAL. L. REV. 1449
    1998
  • Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights and "The Civil Rights Agenda"
    Santa Clara Law Digital Commons
    January1994
Books & Book Chapters:
  • Evolutionary Dynamics and the Economic Analysis of Law
    Thomas Ulen ed. Elgar
    April 2015
  • Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage
    NYU Press
    January 2014
  • Introduction, Race Is, Race Isn't: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Students in Education
    Laurence Parker and Donna Deyhle eds.
    1998

Contact

Phone
(213) 740-6228