This lecture addresses the question how race-thinking was part of the Dutch legal system and legal scholarship as a way to explore the ‘legal archive’. It discusses the legal work on race and mixture of three Dutch jurists: L.W.C. van den Berg (1845-1927), a colonial legislator who wrote the Mixed Marriages Act for the Dutch East Indies; W.F. Wertheim (1907-1998), professor in colonial law, who later distanced himself from the Dutch colonial system of which he had been part, and H. de Bie (1879-1955) who, as the first children’s judge in Rotterdam, worried about Dutch girls and their intimate relationships with Chinese men. This study argues that understanding our legal past (the ‘legal archive’) is crucial to further our knowledge about how race and mixture work in law today, and that such knowledge is vital for social justice.