ABSTRACT
The relationships between law and ‘race’ 1 throughout world history can be characterized as Janus-faced. On the one hand, law has been used as an instrument to fight racial discrimination (1) by the provision of accessible remedies for individuals who have suffered discrimination or (2) by the provision of preventive measures in order to obtain some tangible reduction in the incidence of racial discrimination, or (3) as a vehicle of social engineering to counteract not only direct discrimination but also the social, cultural, political, and other factors that can underpin indirect discrimination and racial disadvantage (MacEwen 1999: 427). On the other hand, law has been used to naturalize and institutionalize racial discrimination, segregation, and exclusion, for instance, in Apartheid South Africa (e.g., the 1913 Natives Land Act or the ‘Pass laws’), Nazi Germany (e.g., the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring or the 1935 Reichsbürgergesetz), Fascist Italy (e.g., the 1938 leggi razziali), the United States (e.g., the US anti-miscegenation legislation or the ‘Jim Crow Laws’), Indonesia (e.g., the anti-Chinese legislation in force until 1998), or the British colonies (e.g., the British monolingual laws in Hong Kong).
