The book documents the history of state sponsored segregation stretching back to the late 1800s and exposes racially discriminatory policies put forward by most presidential administrations in that time, including liberal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt.

[10] Chapter four discusses a program by the US government, the Own-Your-Own-Home campaign, that systematically made it easier for white people to buy and pay off new homes in suburbs in the early 1900s.

[10] The fifth chapter discusses police and court enforcement of private agreements forbidding the sale of homes in white neighborhoods to blacks and other minorities.

[10] Chapter six discusses white flight and blockbusting tactics used by real estate agents to accelerate the migration in order to make a profit.

[2] The book is devoted to arguing that intractable segregation in America is de jure in nature, being the result of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

[9] Among discussions of other government programs to the same end, the book finds that African Americans were excluded from most FHA insured loans, due to the high risk of providing mortgages on homes in racially mixed neighborhoods, and shows a pattern of US courts upholding private exclusionary agreements, known as covenants, which forbade the sale of homes to minority groups.

"[2] After some analysis of the book and a discussion of background information, Oshinsky closes the review by writing that "[w]hile the road forward is far from clear, there is no better history of this troubled journey than The Color of Law.

[12] In the June 2019 issue of Jacobin magazine, Richard Walker, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California — Berkeley, criticized the book for giving outsized blame to federal policy for housing segregation, a conclusion that he said was the result of Rothstein's "dubious scholarship."

Wrote Walker, "The fundamental error of this thesis stems from its depiction of racism as a system imposed from above, by the state, rather than something embedded in American social structures since before the founding."

Walker states that, while federal housing law "lined up with the prevailing practices of racial segregation … Rothstein's idea that this was imposed on reluctant localities is ludicrous.