For centuries, mixed-race Americans have felt a sense of isolation as unique as their racial makeup. Whether society perceived a multiracial person as White or non-White could determine everything from whom they could marry to which jobs they could work to which areas and homes they could live in.
For comments on an earlier version, we are deeply grateful to Guilherme Almeida, Fiery Cushman, Mihailis Diamantis, Ivar Hannikainen, Scott Hershovitz, Brian Leiter, James Macleod, Roseanna Sommers, Andy Summers, Kevin Tobia, John Witt, Ben Zipursky, and Gideon Yaffe. Katya Botchkina provided excellent research assistance and her philosophical suggestions were immensely helpful to us in drafting Part VI.
A few days before Christmas 1924, William Markowitz sold an air rifle to Richard Kevans. Markowitz should not have made that sale.
For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank Adam Badawi, Douglas Baird, Robert Bartlett, Andrew Bradt, Guy-Uriel Charles, Benjamin Chen, Adam Chilton, Albert Choi, Ryan Copus, Robert Cooter, John Coyle, Kevin Davis, John DeFigueredo, Josh Fischman, Jeffrey Gordon, Joe Grundfest, Mitu Gulati, Andrew Guzman, Deborah Hensler, Tim Holbrook, Bert Huang, William Hubbard, Matthew Jennejohn, Francine Lafontaine, Katerina Linos, Jonathan Masur, Justin McCrary, Joshua Mitts, Kevin Quinn, Bertrall Ross, Sarath Sanga, Robert Scott, Megan Stevenson, Eric Talley, Glenn West, Diego Zambrano, and Eyak Zamir, as well as the participants of workshops at Columbia Law School, NYU School of Law, Stanford Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, University of Virginia School of Law, University of Michigan Law School, UC Davis School of Law, University of Hamburg Faculty of Law, the 2020 American Bar Association M&A Committee Meeting, the 2020 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting, the 2020 Stanford-IACCM Symposium, the 2019 Northwestern Conference on Law and Textual Analysis, the 2019 Annual Empirical Contracts Workshop at Penn, the 2019 Annual Meeting of the German Law and Economics Association, the 2018 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the 2018 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies in Europe, and the 2018 International Conference on the Economics of Litigation.
For helpful discussions, the authors thank Joshua Braver, Yoav Dotan, Roberto Dalledone Machado Filho, Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, Sabrina Ragone, Jeong-In Yun, and participants at the ICON-S Conference in Santiago, Chile, July 2019, as well as workshops at Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Chicago Law School, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Law School, and the University of California-Berkeley School of Law. Thanks to Young Hun Kim for providing useful data and to Kali Cilli and Delhon Braaten for research assistance.
