As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was also surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. Bell himself admitted that he did not have the scholarly credentials that most full professors at Harvard Law have.

There were no doubt other law schools where he would have been a respected colleague, but they were not Stanford or Harvard. Yet it is worth remembering that millions of people have led happy and fulfilling lives without ever being at Harvard or Stanford.

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.