All content tagged with: Legal Education

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  • #ForTheCulture: Generation Z and the Future of Legal Education

    Generation Z, with a birth year between 1995 and 2010, is the most diverse generational cohort in U.S. history and is the largest segment of our population. Gen Zers hold progressive views on social issues and expect diversity and minority representation where they live, work, and learn. American law schools, however, are not known for their diversity, or for being inclusive environments representative of the world around us. This culture of exclusion has led to an unequal legal profession and academy, where less than 10 percent of the population is non-white. As Gen Zers bring their demands for inclusion, and for a legal education that will prepare them to tackle social justice issues head on, they will encounter an entirely different culture—one that is completely at odds with their expectations. This paper adds depth and perspective to the existing literature on Generation Z in legal education by focusing on their social needs and expectations, recognizing them as critical drivers of legal education and reform. To provide Gen Z students with a legal education that will enable them to make a difference for others—a need deeply connected to their motivators and beliefs—law school culture must shift. Reimagining, reconstituting, and reconfiguring legal education to create a culture of inclusion and activism will be essential and necessary. Engaging in this work “for the culture” means getting serious about diversifying our profession by abandoning exclusionary hiring metrics, embedding social justice throughout the law school curriculum, and adopting institutional accountability measures to ensure that these goals are met. Gen Zers are accustomed to opposing institutions that are rooted in inequality; law schools can neither afford, nor ignore the opposition any longer. We must begin reimagining legal education now—and do it, for the culture.

  • Incorporating Social Justice into the 1L Legal Writing Course: A Tool for Empowering Students of Color and of Historically Marginalized Groups and Improving Learning

    The media reports of police shootings of unarmed Black men and women; unprovoked attacks on innocent Jews, Muslims, religious minority groups, and LGBTQ persons; and current pervasive, divisive, and misogynistic rhetoric all cause fear and anxiety in impacted communities and frustrate other concerned citizens. Law students, and especially law students of color and of historically marginalized groups, are often directly or indirectly impacted by these reports and discrimination in all its iterations. As a result, they are stressed because they are fearful and anxious. Research shows that stress impairs learning and cognition. Research also shows that beneficial changes are made in the brain, and learning and cognition improve when students are empowered and motivated by their lessons. Incorporating issues of social justice into the first-year legal writing course benefits all students by equipping them with the knowledge and practical skills to address issues of social injustice and to affect social change. Incorporating issues of social justice into the first-year legal writing course has the added benefit of contributing to a learning environment that permits law students of color and of historically marginalized groups to learn more successfully by reducing stress, altering their perception of control over psychosocial stressors, building positive emotions, increasing confidence, and motivating them to learn.

  • Am I My Client? Revisited: The Role of Race in Intra-Race Legal Representation

    This Article examines the challenges of intra-race legal representation for lawyers of color, law students of color, and those teaching law students of color by analyzing how the dynamics of the lawyer’s and client’s racial sameness impact legal representation. This Article brings together three strands of lawyering theory – the role of race in lawyering, critical race theory, and the role of the lawyer in intra-race legal representation. In doing so, this Article explores a number of provocative questions: Does being the same race as their clients make lawyers better legal representatives? Should lawyers of color embrace or resist race’s influence on intra-race legal representation? How do lawyers balance their desire to remain representative of their race with their responsibility to their clients? This Article also scrutinizes the role of the lawyer of color in intra-race legal representation by examining questions that are under-reviewed, such as: Do lawyers of color engage in the same explicit and implicit biases against their clients of color that lawyers of color similarly suffer? Do racial stereotypes tempt the lawyer to be more sympathetic towards, and understanding of, their same-race clients, or does it cause the lawyer to view the same-race client as an ‘other’? For lawyers of color and clients of color who seek same-race legal representation, this Article explores a difficult question— Is the lawyer of color representative enough of the race to be a representative for the client, particularly when the lawyer of color and the client of color live in different socio-economic environments? Given the resurgent examination of the role of race in interactions between persons of color and persons of power, this Article presents a timely opportunity to examine and question the role of race and the impact of divergent socio-economic status in intra-race legal representation.

  • Foreword: Reflections on Our Founding

    Law Journals have been under heavy criticism for as long as we can remember. The criticisms come from all quarters, including judges, law professors, and even commentators at large. In an address at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference almost a decade ago, for example, Chief Justice Roberts complained about the “disconnect between the academy and the profession.” More pointedly, he continued, “[p]ick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.” Similarly, law professors have developed what Lawrence Friedman calls “a literature of invective” against law reviews. Adam Liptak summarized one line of criticism with a question: “[W]hy are law reviews, the primary repositories of legal scholarship, edited by law students?”

  • Trajectory of a Law Professor

    Women of color are already severely underrepresented in legal academia; as enrollment drops and legal institutions constrict further, race and gender disparities will likely continue to grow. Yet, as many deans and associate deans, most of whom are white, step down from leadership positions during these tumultuous times in legal education, opportunities have arisen for women of color to fill those roles in record numbers. However, there are individual and structural barriers preventing access to the leadership level. Significant hurdles have long prevented women of color from entering law teaching. Thus, this Article provides evidence to support the thesis that ongoing changes in legal education will likely continue to create barriers both to entry and advancement for women of color law faculty members and those who aspire to join legal academia. This Article draws from quantitative and qualitative analyses of data drawn from the Diversity in Legal Academia (DLA) project, a landmark mixed-method study of law faculty diversity, which utilizes an intersectional lens to focus on the experiences of women of color in legal academia while also incorporating those of white men, white women, and men of color. Empirical findings reveal that structural barriers (i.e., outright discrimination) as well as more indirect obstacles prevent women of color from joining legal academia in meaningful numbers and also preclude women of color who are already legal academics from taking on leadership positions. Law school administrators and policy makers should work against these structural and individual barriers to increase and improve faculty diversity at all levels. Greater diversity in legal academia generally, and leadership in particular, will not only provide greater opportunities for particular law faculty members, but will also have a positive effect on law students, legal education, legal academia, and the legal profession overall.

  • Justice and Law Journals

    What is the role for a law journal in advancing justice? What is the role of a justice-minded practitioner in furthering legal scholarship? And what is the intersection—practically and normatively—for law journals, legal scholars, practitioners, and justice? This brief Article attempts to lay a foundation for answering these important, but oft-neglected, questions. In the following conversation, a frequent contributor to the Michigan Journal of Race & Law (MJRL) and a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal posit some ideas on how legal scholarship engages with justice, and how race-conscious practitioners can interact with race-conscious legal scholars.

  • How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition

    This Article offers the first comprehensive account of the marginalization of the African American Christian tradition in the movement of race and law scholarship known as critical race theory. While committed to grounding itself in the perspectives of communities of color, critical race theory has virtually ignored the significance of the fact that the civil rights movement came out of the Black church and that today more than eighty percent of African Americans self-identify as Christian. In practical terms, critical race theory’s neglect of the Christian tradition has meant that arguments developed in race and law scholarship are sometimes incompatible with the deeply religious normative frameworks that many Black Americans bring to bear on issues of law and justice. As a result, there is a significant disconnect between race and law scholarship and the comprehensive normative commitments of the community whose concerns that scholarship seeks to address. By offering the first comprehensive account of this disconnect, this Article supplies an important foundation for scholars who wish to close the gap between race and law scholarship and the larger African American community.

  • It’s Critical: Legal Participatory Action Research

    This Article introduces a method of research that we term “legal participatory action research” or “legal PAR” as a way for legal scholars and activists to put various strands of critical legal theory into practice. Specifically, through the lens of legal PAR, this Article contributes to a rapidly developing legal literature on the “fringe economy” that comprises “alternative lending services” and products, including but not limited to pawnshops, check cashers, payday lenders, direct deposit loans, (tax) refund anticipation loans, and car title loans. As importantly, this article also contributes to the related fields of critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and critical race feminism by advocating legal PAR as a form of critical race/feminist praxis, which we employ, specifically, to address the ways in which race and gender remain inextricably linked to poverty and ever-widening economic inequalities and disparities. To demonstrate how legal PAR works in practice, we describe in this Article a local, community-based research project on predatory lending practices that we undertook from fall 2012 through summer 2013 in partnership with Public Allies Cincinnati, an AmeriCorps program whose goal is to identify, develop, and train a new “generation” of diverse community leaders and organizers. Further, we explain in this Article how and why our ongoing community-based research is grounded in theoretical commitments and values represented by critical race/feminism and the established, interdisciplinary field of participatory action research. Finally, we examine and reflect upon the challenges and benefits involved in doing legal PAR—both in practical and theoretical terms—in the context of our specific project, in the hopes that interested legal researchers, scholars, teachers, students, and activists will be inspired to develop legal PAR research projects of their own.

  • The Promise of Grutter: Diverse Interactions at the University of Michigan Law School

    In Grutter v. Bollinger, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School on the grounds of educational diversity. Yet the Court's assumption that admitting diverse students into law school would result in improved race relations, livelier classroom conversations, and better professional outcomes for students has never been empirically tested. This Article relies on survey and focus group data collected at the University of Michigan Lav School campus itself in March 2010 to examine not only whether, but how diversity affects learning. The data indicate both that there are sufficient numbers of students of color on the University of Michigan Law School campus to yield diverse interactions and that positive interracial student exchanges are occurring. Nevertheless, the lively discussions drawing from this diversity anticipated by the Grutter Court are seldom taking place within the classroom, where they may be most important; by neglecting to foster "diversity discussions," law schools are failing to cultivate the academic and professional benefits associated with educational diversity. Only through classroom diversity can the promise of diversity envisioned by the Grutter Court be fully realized.

  • Teaching Whren to White Kids

    This Article addresses issues at the intersection of United States v. Whren and Grutter v. Bollinger at a time when the reality of racial profiling was recently illustrated by the high-profile arrest of a prominent Harvard professor. Given the highly racialized nature of criminal procedure, there is a surprising dearth of writing about the unique problems of teaching issues such as racial profiling in racially homogeneous classrooms. Because African American and other minority students often experience the criminal justice system in radically different ways than do Whites, the lack of minority voices poses a significant barrier to effectively teaching criminal procedure. This Article critiques current law school pedagogical approaches and suggests that we must both re-think academic methods for teaching criminal procedure within the classroom and expose 'post-racial" mythologizing outside the classroom.