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Introduction
Critical Race Theory (hereinafter CRT), an offspring of Critical Legal Studies (hereinafter CLS), is one of the most successful and controversial United States' legal theories developed over the past 10 years and has in turn branched out into different equally creative fields, from LatCrit to AsianCrit to Queer Theory. In spite of offering a general legal theory, CRT has not really stepped outside the United States' legal system and has, very surprisingly, received almost no attention at all in the continental European legal world, unlike the Law & Economics movement. In fact, an extensive research in current French, German, Italian, and Austrian legal literature has produced only very limited results, and even on a broader level, CRT seems to have gone practically unheeded in Europe. To date there are only four publications dealing exclusively with CRT in a foreign, European language: two are in Italian1 and two in French.2 Of the latter two, one was published in a Canadian law review3 and therefore is not strictly "European." Spain has also only recently experienced a limited exposure to LatCrit theory, hosting the first annual colloquium on "The Spanish Legal System and LatCrit Theory: A Dialogue" in June 1999 at the Universidad de Malaga. However, the only article published reporting on this event was found in an American law review.4
Apart from descriptive American law review articles of the CRT movement, there is actually only one piece that applies CRT to the European context;5 two others simply draw exposure to it.6 Even assuming this list of publications is not exhaustive, it is still astonishing that globally speaking CRT has been granted very little attention, especially considering that Europe has been suffering from a new wave of racist and xenophobic events during the past 15 years, which has prompted an almost unprecedented reaction on both political and legal institutional levels. Yet, CRT analysis is completely absent.
In Part I of this paper, I will give an overview of CRT's history and basic tenets. In Part II, I intend to explore, albeit in a somewhat speculative and descriptive manner, why the European legal systems, and especially those belonging to the civil law tradition,7 have been so unresponsive to CRT analysis.8 A broad mix of cultural, ideological, historical,...