Law, Legal Socializations, and Epistemic Injustice

This review essay looks at the relationship between Deborah Tuerkheimer's Credible (2021) and Meera Deo's Unequal Profession (2019) in order to make a substantive point about inequality in legal institutions and the methods that are employed in dissecting them. At first glance, the connections between these projects might not seem apparent, although each deals with the inequalities in which its actors in focus are embedded. But both projects go deeper by unveiling institutional inequities that are often in plain sight when we investigate the background frameworks implicated in their production, and they reveal the problematic relationship between everyday discrimination and the systemic biases that justify them. Finally, reading these books together allows us to make an intervention about the methods and credibility of narratives within socio-legal scholarship more generally. In theorizing about legitimacy, we ask how the way in which we are told to look at structures of normativity changes the kinds of inequities we are able to see.