“justice is blind” is a central value and claim of criminal justice institutions, and modern legal systems more generally. This course takes a mainly historical approach to examine the overt and subtle ways that this blindness has been compromised by being commodified, gendered, and racialized. In terms of overt class boundaries, this ‘blindness’ emerged with the rise of the nation-state, but it was long gendered and racialized in overt ways and commodified in more subtle ones. Since roughly the 1960s, the U.S. has been in an era where all three social boundaries impinge on law’s blindness in ways that tend to be more subtle than overt. Using a social boundary approach, students in this course will learn these historical trajectories to the present as a foundation for thinking critically about criminal justice, the legal system, and contemporary social inequality more generally. A major focus is law’s relationship to inequalities based on race, class, and gender.