The Role of Law Schools In Creating Social Change

Jonathan Rapping, Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, has published Grooming Tomorrow's Change Agents: The Role of Law Schools in Helping to Create a Just Society. Here is the abstract.

Numerous authorities have lamented the fact that America’s criminal justice system is broken. To address this crisis, experts have proposed a range of policy proscriptions. But these proposals overlook a fundamental driver of this state of injustice. The criminal justice system as it now exists is defined by a value system inconsistent with justice. And many professionals responsible for administering criminal justice – politicians, judges, prosecutors, and defense counsel – have been shaped by this corrupted value system. As a result, those responsible for justice in America frequently promote unjust outcomes. If we are ever to realize meaningful reform, we must groom a generation of professionals who embrace those ideals fundamental to American justice, and work together to infuse the criminal justice system with these values. Because so many of these professionals are lawyers, our nation’s law schools must play an indispensable role in this effort. Critics have identified some significant shortcomings in legal education. Many have pointed to the failure of law schools to teach skills and values essential to the practice of law. Some have urged law schools to inspire graduates to find careers that promote the public interest. But largely overlooked is the need to equip lawyers with strategies to promote justice in broken systems. If law schools are going to fulfil their obligation to help us realize our most noble ideals, they must develop curricula designed to not only teach lawyers values and motivate them towards social justice careers; but to also arm them with tools to resist systems hostile to the principles that define us as a nation. This article discusses this challenge and examines two efforts to equip young lawyers with tools and strategies to become the change agents necessary to drive reform; one through an innovative law school curricula and the other through the training and mentoring of lawyers post law school in the crucial arena of indigent defense.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Law and Literature In the First Year Curriculum: Tort Law

Zahr Said, University of Washington School of Law, has published Incorporating Literary Methods and Texts in the Teaching of Tort Law at 3 California Law Review Circuit 170 (January 2012). Here is the abstract.

This essay, presented in a Law and Humanities Section panel at the 2012 AALS Annual Meeting, discusses my use of literature to aid and amplify legal analysis in a first-year Torts class. Literary texts and methods helped my students investigate how the law conceives of, and expresses, duties and losses among parties. The course drew on several diverse strands of law-and-literature methodology and it incorporated literary texts and methods into discussions of case law and legal policy to produce analysis that is deeply interdisciplinary.



Content and methodology, to the extent they can be satisfactorily decoupled, informed my teaching of Torts in separate ways. First, I incorporated a central literary text that accompanied more traditional legal materials. Second, I required students to engage in close reading and I helped them theorize the act of reading itself. By emphasizing the textually mediated nature of the cases — both as a function of common law’s system of authority through analogy, and as a function of the casebook editors’ choices — I hope to have made clear to students that this is a new type of reading they are doing in law school, and that they are learning to think in new ways. In growing acculturated to legal analysis, law students are learning not just a new language, but a new awareness of how and why they read the way they do.



The paper includes an appendix listing some discussion questions for The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks, one of the texts I used in the class.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Harry Potter in the Law School Curriculum

Marc Roark of the Literary Table on using Harry Potter in the Law School curriculum.

Summer School Program on the Cultural Study of the Law

From Peter Schneck, Summer School Director:

The Third International Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law will be held from this August 7th to August 21st in Osnabrück, Germany. Hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies, in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, the Birkbeck School of Law at the University of London, York University, Toronto, The Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence and the European Legal Studies Institute at the University of Osnabrück, the summer school seeks to bring together graduate students from around the world to promote and examine the interdisciplinary study and research of law and culture.




During the two week program, students will partake in a unique experience of scholarly collaboration and exchange through workshops, public lectures, panel discussions, excursions and a final symposium.



The School will offer a total of four workshops for 20-25 international graduate students over a two-week period. The first workshop will be concerned with basic theories, concepts and perspectives within the emerging field of cultural legal studies, focusing specifically on the range and potential of interdisciplinary studies and approaches. The remaining three workshops will focus on key areas of critical inquiry that have been central to the dynamic development of the field and are of particular importance within an European context, for example:



--The relation between human rights and cultural rights



--Towards a Culture of Rights?: Law, Literature and the Cultural Presence of the Law



--Copyright, Authorship and the ‘Propertization’ of Culture



*Participant Eligibility*

Doctoral candidates in literature, the law, the arts, the humanities, and the related social sciences are invited to apply, as are advanced students pursuing a J.D. or its equivalent (such as the L.L.B). Young scholars or junior faculty members who have received a Ph.D. or corresponding degree in the last five years are also eligible. There are openings for approximately 25 students to participate in the summer school.



*Application Process*

Applicants should complete:



--> An application form, indicating preferred workshop that can be found at: http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture/admission/



--> A statement of purpose no more than two pages long, describing current scholarly interests, previous research, and plans for how the Summer School would specifically further these interests and plans.



--> An up-to-date curriculum vitae.



Students interested in taking part in the Summer School should submit their applications no later than April 30, 2011. Detailed information about the school, the workshops, international faculty, admission and fees can be found at:

http://www.blogs.uni-osnabrueck.de/lawandculture


*Questions*

Please direct all inquiries about the school to our coordinator's office at

lawandculture@uos.de

Storytelling Across the Curriculum

Carolyn Grose, William Mitchell College of Law, has published Storytelling Across the Curriculum: From Margin to Center, from Clinic to the Classroom, in volume 7 of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (2010). Here is the abstract.

Narrative theory and storytelling can be used throughout the law school curriculum, cutting across types of courses and types of lawyering. I teach skills, doctrinal, and clinical courses, and I use narrative theory and storytelling in all three, always with the same goal: to help students recognize that as lawyers, they are not only hearers and tellers of stories, but also, and perhaps most important, constructors of stories.

I use the term “narrative theory” to describe the study of story construction, which is different from - though clearly related to - story telling. Construction is the act of building: putting together the elements that comprise the story and then writing it down. Performance of the story - reading it, telling it, enacting it - comes later.

In this piece, I develop the idea of using storytelling across the curriculum to teach students critical thinking and reflection about their role as lawyers. In Part One, I describe the importance of storytelling and stories in the craft of lawyering. Part Two describes my own teaching in the context of narrative theory and practice, and it analyzes how and why this context achieves the goal of developing students’ critical thinking skills and reflective practice. The piece concludes with the suggestion that narrative theory and storytelling as a pedagogy used systematically across individual courses and the curriculum has the potential to transform a student’s experience of law school, resulting in her development as an empowered, reflective, and socially responsible member of the legal profession, regardless of the kind of law she practices or the kinds of clients she represents.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Literature in the Health Law Curriculum

We missed this interesting piece when it first appeared, but we're trying to make amends now. Stacey A. Tovino, Hamline University School of Law, published "Incorporating Literature Into a Health Law Curriculum" at 9 MSU Journal of Medicine and Law 213 (2005). Here is the abstract.

Literature has had a long relationship with medicine through literary images of disease, literary images of physicians and other healers, works of literature by physician-writers, and the use of literature as a method of active or passive healing. Literature also has had a long relationship with the law through literary images of various legal processes, lawyers, and judges, works of literature by lawyer-writers, and the use of literature as therapy. How can the field of law and literature inform the study of health law? And how can the field of literature and medicine help the field of law and literature in this regard? This article shows how the descriptive, contextual, and narrative qualities of literature, literary nonfiction, and illness narratives can be used to enhance traditional case law, statutory, and regulatory approaches to teaching health law. Examples are drawn from Samuel Shem's The House of God, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Download the article from SSRN here.

For more resources on integrating law, medicine, and the humanities see the webpage for Tom Mayo's course here at Southern Methodist University School of Law and some materials that I have at my website on Law and the Humanities, for example, here.

Law and Literature in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Robin Lister, University of Bradford, presents a case for teaching Law and Literature in the undergraduate curriculum, in "Law and Literature and the LLB: An Apology for Poetry in the Undergraduate Law Curriculum." It was presented at the Learning in Law Annual Conference, UK Centre for Legal Education, University of Warwick, January 2007. Here is the abstract.

A survey of UK law schools suggests that only 'three or four' offer Law and Literature as an optional subject on their Qualifying Law Degrees (Harris & Beinart, 2005). This number seems surprisingly low, given the proliferation of Law and Literature literature since the emergence of this distinctive approach to thinking about law in the US in the 1970s, the widespread availability of Law and Literature courses in US law schools, and the advocacy of Law and Literature studies on law degrees by a number of UK academics throughout the 1990s (for example, Lee, 1990; Aristodemou, 1993; Ward, 1993; Bradney, 2000).

Download the entire paper from SSRN here.

Cross posted to The Seamless Web.