Kennedy - a Harvard law professor, Rhodes scholar and graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School - has spent much of his life trying to find his way off the beaten path. And that search has often brought him into conflict with his peers. His notoriety dates at least to 1989, when he published a celebrated (and also widely condemned) article in the Harvard Law Review critiquing three prominent proponents of what has come to be known as critical race theory. The so-called crits make use of novelistic techniques and reject many conventions of traditional scholarship in their quest for a more profound understanding of racially charged issues. Kennedy took issue not merely with their methods but questioned the quality of their work.

Shortly thereafter, he launched Reconstruction, a journal that won both renown and infamy by hurling thunderbolts at politically correct ideas. Having shuttered the publication a year and a half ago, he has now set his sights on creating a body of work that will make a noise far beyond the Ivy League’s walls.

He has authored “Race, Crime and the Law” (538 pages. Pantheon. $30), the first of what he hopes will be a series of books on race and law, and he has written a cover story for the May Atlantic Monthly denouncing the very idea of racial allegiance among blacks. In it, he takes Yale law professor Stephen Carter to task for writing that he cared more about the “good opinions of black people” than about the opinions of whites. Kennedy insists that race simply should not matter. Yet when asked whether criticism from other blacks has cut particularly deeply, he admits, “As a plain matter of fact, probably it did . . . And my response to that is, there’s a difference between the way one feels and maybe the way one should feel.”

The tension between the ideal and the real is amply illustrated in his new book. Kennedy effectively defends Johnnie Cochran’s famous summation on behalf of O. J. Simpson. “An explicit appeal to race would be out,” Kennedy explained during a conversation, “but here it is complicated.” Cochran, after all, never made an overt racial appeal and certainly never indicated his client was guilty, but then said “acquit him” anyway. It seems an odd argument. For the fact is that white lawyers who defended murderers of blacks in the South - including the killers of Emmett Till, a black teenager who supposedly asked a white woman for a date in Mississippi in 1955 - also routinely insisted that their clients were innocent, while they winked and called for juries to send a message by setting them free. And, as Kennedy makes clear, he definitely doesn’t believe justice was served by their tactics.

The book focuses on a range of other issues, including the question of whether blacks are disproportionately prosecuted. Kennedy believes a much bigger problem is that black communities are generally underprotected. He documents the evils of a system that, for years, refused to offer protection to blacks from slave owners, from racist mobs, from white rapists. It would be an unacceptable and cruel parody of progress, he suggests, to leave black communities unprotected from black thugs in a misguided attempt to set things straight.

Kennedy’s criticisms are not limited to the political left. He bluntly rejects the arguments of those, generally on the right, who claim there has been no racial bias in the administration of the death penalty. And he lambasts those who see affirmative action as discriminatory and therefore wrong but who raise no objection to police targeting blacks as criminal suspects.

When asked to position himself politically, Kennedy reels off an array of leftist credentials: he is on the editorial boards of The Nation and Dissent magazines, and he believes in raising taxes, spending massive sums on inner-city education and redistributing power and wealth: “Yet, over and over again, people describe me as a conservative because of some of the views I take with respect to racial politics. Fine! I don’t care.” It is obvious, however, that he does care, that a big part of his self-assigned mission is to fight against the tyranny of labels and stereotypes. It is also obvious that it is a battle he is not even close to winning. Take it as a mark of his idealism, and maybe his naivete, that he insists that the battle can be won, and that he clings so fervently to the notion that what he should feel will ultimately triumph over what he feels in fact.