Derrick Bell

Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Bell first worked for the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 school desegregation cases in Mississippi.

After a decade as a civil rights lawyer, Bell moved into academia where he spent the second half of his life. He started teaching at the University of Southern California, then moved to Harvard Law School where he became the first tenured African-American professor of law in 1971. From 1991 until his death in 2011, Bell was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law, and a dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. While he was a visiting, he was a professor of constitutional law.

Bell developed important scholarship, writing many articles and multiple books, using his practical legal experience and his academic research to examine racism, particularly in the legal system. Bell questioned civil rights advocacy approaches, partially stemming from frustrations in his own experiences as a lawyer. Bell is often credited as one of the originators of critical race theory.