Rethinking the Law: Pedagogy, Race, and Systems

Catalog description

This seminar explores how the law operates in race-making and legalizing racial hierarchies. It will challenge students to critically rethink the law––which dictates everyone's lives––and its role in racial oppression, to deconstruct how the law is presented as the solution to injustice. In particular, this course examines U.S. legal education: How is the legal system introduced to law students? How do law school courses approach historical and sociopolitical analysis? Is there a relationship between mainstream approaches to legal pedagogy and the racial injustices and hierarchies that are baked into the legal system? Do "seminal cases" teach "rules" or normalize and uphold the racial status quo? This seminar covers six units that parallel first-year doctrinal classes like Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Contracts, Constitutional Law, Torts, and Property; and analyzes legal tenets to unpack their assumptions and biases. While students will learn how law schools teach students to "think like a lawyer" using established methods for reading cases (e.g., the IRAC method - Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion), they will also realize the shortcomings of thinking like a lawyer through a Critical Race Theory lens. Through close readings of cases such as Ashcroft v. Iqbal, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Korematsu v. United States, this interdisciplinary seminar will go beyond the legal canon and explore the role of legal pedagogy in race-making. Texts by CRT scholars, pieces by historians and sociologists, and art (films, poems, fiction novels) will guide students to fill the gaps in legal education and interrogate the legal system.