Is there anything like a principle of anti-racism in law? Interview with Shreya Atrey on her new book “Anti-Racism as a Legal Principle”
Is there anything like a principle of anti-racism in law? While racial discrimination law is often perceived to be anti-racist, it is only so in a liberal or cultural, but not transformative, sense. Racial discrimination law is effective only against a narrow range of interpersonal or individual racism, thus leaving intact structural racism and the drivers of racial disadvantage.
In her new book “Anti-Racism as a Legal Principle”, published on 4 September 2026 by Oxford University Press, Professor Shreya Atrey argues that anti-racism must be recognised as a legal principle in order to effectively confront and address the full extent of structural racism. She presents a theoretical account of anti-racism as a legal principle and locates it within the legal doctrine of British, comparative (Canadian, Indian and South African), and international law. “Anti-Racism as a Legal Principle” shows that law, especially racial discrimination law, can and indeed should be anti-racist by committing to address structural racism in a transformative sense.
Order the book now through Oxford University Press.
We interviewed Shreya about what inspired the book, its comparative approach, and what anti-racism as a legal principle could mean in practice – read her answers below.
What prompted you to write Anti-Racism as a Legal Principle, and what is the book’s central argument?
"Equality law does not prohibit ‘racism’. It prohibits ‘racial discrimination’. I always found that perplexing and wanted to explore the relationship between racism and racial discrimination. The Current Legal Problems lecture I delivered in 2021 provided an early opportunity to do so. It was also the time when the global Black Lives Matter protests erupted. With that I realised there was a bigger story to tell here that deserved book length treatment. Hence, Anti-Racism as a Legal Principle.
The central argument is twofold. First, anti-racism should be conceived as a legal principle which guides the imagination and operation of all law and policy to address structural racism. There is no fundamental legal bar to the invocation of anti-racism as a general principle of law, much like democracy or the rule of law. Without a principle of anti-racism, law, especially discrimination law, seems to operate rudderless in responding to the whole range of racial discrimination claims that are made and the whole range of racism that is out there. Second, anti-racism as a legal principle can be located in judicial reasoning in racial discrimination claims, and occasional successes show the difference that anti-racism as a legal principle makes to adjudication."
You argue that racial discrimination law struggles to address structural racism. Why is that, and what do you mean by “structural racism”?
"The first thing to appreciate is what Kimberlé Crenshaw and other critical race theorists showed long before me. That something like equality law or racial discrimination law is fundamentally indeterminate or ambiguous. It is neither an irreversible declaration of law’s commitment to social justice nor is it complicit in the very modes of injustice it says it can address. Between the liberal and realist claims lies the critical claim which acknowledges that racial discrimination law does struggle to address structural racism, but it need not, and in fact it can address structural racism with some normative and doctrinal realignment.
The normative realignment is critical as it involves grasping structural racism properly. I find much of what is written about structures, structural discrimination or structural racism either rhetorical or conceptually unsatisfying. When I started to find scholarship which I thought was intellectually illuminating, I started to see the wood for the trees in being able to distil the kernel of structural racism. I do this in chapter 2 which argues that structural racism is to do with who enacts it (state and state- like entities), how it comes about (processes of racialization), and what it does (instate a framework of disadvantage)."
What would it mean in practice for anti-racism to become a legal principle?
"One may expect that anti-racism as a legal principle is a law reform project. Acknowledging or enacting ‘anti-racism’ in constitutions, statutes, policies or such. Sure, that could be a good thing. For example, I find the EU Anti-Racism Strategy 2026–2030 quite compelling.
But it isn’t in the naming of ‘anti-racism’ that anti- racism comes alive. The practice of anti-racism, as the book shows, is located in the cervices of how law and policy operate – the devil is in the detail, which in law, is often a matter of doctrine. That is the granular stuff lawyers interested in equality and human rights should be interested in."
The book looks at law in the UK alongside Canada, India, South Africa and international law. What did this comparative approach reveal?
"I am an incorrigible comparativist. Thankfully it is also an accepted and well-worn methodology in the field. That does not mean one does not need to explain how they deploy the comparative methodology. Every researcher bears that burden, and I would like to quote from the book to show how I discharge it:
each of the jurisdictions— Canada, India, and South Africa— were part of the Empire and connected to the UK as their erstwhile colonizer and metropole. Race was critical in colonization in that it served a key function of both dividing colonized populations and also dividing the colonized and the colonizer. In this way, race became a category of difference and ultimately hierarchy which justified the rule of the colonizer (deemed racially superior) over the colonized (deemed racially inferior). This trajectory of difference to hierarchy to oppression is essentially the sequence of racialization to race to racism explained in Part I of this book. Decolonization thus entails the reversal of this logic, that is, anti-racism. Each of the jurisdictions has had to engage with anti-racism in imagining their postcolonial democracies. In the main, they have done this through their constitutions. For this reason, their constitutional law provides important lessons for all postcolonial democracies, including, mutatis mutandis, the UK (p 222).
This is to say that comparison bears an incredible promise of revealing epistemes that are unknown or unfamiliar to a jurisdiction. And in this project, comparison yielded incredible insights into how the constitutional protection from racial discrimination in Canada, India and South Africa, occasionally, if not always, operate to give effect to anti-racism as a legal principle. This discussion is located in chapter 9."
What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
"The book is for a broad audience, and I think different readers will take different things away from the book. Part I is entirely general and anyone – and I genuinely mean anyone and not just lawyers – interested in race, racism and anti-racism may find its normative work appealing. Part II is doctrinal and domestic (British), comparative (especially India, South African and Canadian), and international lawyers may find it useful. But I hope lawyers who do not work in these contexts also find something in the doctrinal offering – for example, on how studies of racial discrimination law can be both granular and at scale at the same time, or how they can be both general and specific and speak to particularities in a country but also go beyond."
About Professor Shreya Atrey
Shreya Atrey is an Associate Professor in International Human Rights Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. She is the Dean and Racial Justice and Equality Fellow at Kellogg College, and a Senior Teaching Fellow at New College where she leads the MSc in International Human Rights Law. She is an associate member of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and the Oxford Human Rights Hub. Shreya is the Editor of the Human Rights Law Review journal which is published by the Oxford University Press.
Shreya has worked extensively with governments, United Nations institutions, the Council of Europe and the European Union. She advises on issues of equality and discrimination across a range of jurisdictions and in domestic and international law contexts both.