The study offers an empirical analysis of the emergence and evolution of Federal hate crime laws--the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the Violence Against Women Act and the Hate Crimes Penalty Enhancement Act--that determine who is and is not eligible for hate crime victim status. The content of federal hate crime law was shaped by a series of temporally bound institutionally qualified processes whereby: (1) the empirical credibility of the scope of hate crime as a social problem was established by the claimsmaking of established social movement organizations; (2) race, religion and ethnicity are the anchoring provisions of all hate crime law; (3) the domain of the law expanded to include additional provisions, most notably sexual orientation and gender; and (4) the increased differentiation of legal subjects in subsequent law occurred in ways consistent with previously established and institutionalized policy pedigrees. Taken together, these findings reveal how microlevel processes of categorization work, mesolevel processes of social movement mobilization, and larger processes of institutionalization interface as political actors create and coalesce around legal meanings that define both “condition-categories” and “people-categories.” Notes, tables, references, statutes cited