On Becoming a Legal Person 119careers. Now, what’s going on here, why does it take thirty years for
Dempsey to meet Wills? Now there are all kinds of overtones, racial and
otherwise in this case. But I think there’s a pretty simple explanation for
why Dempsey doesn’t want to fight Wills. And I don’t think- I could be
wrong about this- that it has anything to do with matters of race. I think it’s
a bit simpler than that. Take a wild guess, Ms. U.
Ms. U.: He was afraid to lose?
Prof.: He was afraid that he was going to get maimed by Wills, the “Brown
Bomber” who was probably the greatest boxer of the world, indeed, of
the universe at that point, and Dempsey wants to stay away from him,
okay? Now there are a lot of people who want to try to get him to fight
Wills, but there is, alas, a problem with the color bar in a lot of places and
there are a lot of promoters who won’t touch that fight and there are a lot
of people who are worried about the future of the sport. [... ] Now
maybe Dempsey is worried about the future of the sport; my guess is he’s
worried about losing the battle. And maybe he finally realizes that that’s
what’s going to happen. He signs the contract and he tries to back out.
Now what do you do with the fact that he’s backed out of this contract?
What do we do with that? We know there’s a breach of contract, at least
the court tells us there’s a breach of contract. What does the promoter
here, the Chicago Coliseum Club, want to recover? Let’s start with the
first item. [... rest of professor turn, focusing on lost profits, omitted... ]A third professor covered the Dempsey case with no mention of race whatsoever
(4/7/8).
We also find this kind of approach to social context and identity in a class-
room taught by an African American professor, when an African American stu-
dent raises the question of whether the racial identity of one of the parties might
have influenced a case outcome:
Transcript 6.18 [2/3/37]Prof.: It could have. Th- and it may have been complicated. It could have been
important to the decision-making. And, in fact, I mean you could imagine
that all of this legal gobbledegook is simply a cloak for, you know, an-
racial animus. It’s a possibility. On the other hand, it could have been this
person simply put down the fact that the, ah, this is a quote, Negro, simply
out of a reflex. Out of a, you know, this race being important for the
moment (.) a reflex. And it really didn’t have anything to do with the
ultimate outcome of the case- that in fact if this guy Skinner had been
white, same result. Tough () sort of get beneath the- the um the ah (.) the
materials at hand. It’s not, I mean it could have been important, then again
it might not have been important. Tough to tell.Here the professor is, of course, completely correct that it is hard to tell much about
this aspect of social context from the materials at hand, whether from the case ex-
cerpts themselves or the accompanying casebook commentaries and additional read-
ings. But then again, that is because elision and erasure and lack of precision on such
matters are intrinsic aspects of the legal approach that is being taught in these class-
rooms—and being enacted in actual case law decisions. Notice that in previous