A 20th Anniversary New Legal Realism Conference on Inclusion, “Bleached Out” Identity, and Ethics in Legal Education
October 18-19, 2024
In a time when racial inclusion in US law schools is under debate and attack, this conference poses fundamental, empirically based challenges to law teaching. Many years ago, NLR co-founder David Wilkins critiqued the standard legal approach to “bleached-out professionalism” for Black lawyers. We draw from that work, as well as from relevant social science research and theory, from Critical Race Theory, from research outside of mainstream Global North traditions, and from other perspectives that shake up taken-for-granted “truths” undergirding traditional U.S. legal education. Furthermore, conference participants will bring new paradigms developed within the legal academy to bear on assumptions that have guided traditional Western social science itself. In opening up this truly interdisciplinary space for conversation, the conference will encourage the development of expansive research and teaching frameworks for the legal academy – frameworks containing possibilities for real change.
New Legal Realism (NLR) is a movement that began in the early 2000s, aimed at producing and translating excellent empirical research on law and legal institutions for legal professionals. With deep roots in the law-and-society tradition, NLR has worked to build bridges between social science and the legal academy and has always highlighted research on legal education. NLR scholars have published cutting-edge articles on how to integrate social science into legal training, working between theory, empirical research, and the practices involved in law teaching. As those scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, there are very important links between legal education and the ethical orientations of the legal profession. Those ethics depend importantly on perspectives that take the social reality of law seriously, as well on inclusive visions for the profession as a whole in a democratic state. From its first conference in 2004, NLR has engaged deeply with race, gender, and global approaches to law as foundational parts of research on law in books and law in action.
Agenda:
Friday, October 18, 2024
Milstein East Conference Center
Wasserstein Hall
Harvard Law School
2:00 pm – Registration
Milstein East Conference Center, Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School
2:45-3:15 pm – Welcome
David B. Wilkins
Elizabeth Mertz
3:15-3:30 pm – New Legal Realism and Legal Education
Shauhin Talesh
3:45 -5:15 pm – New Legal Realism and Aspirational Law Training: Intersectional Insights, Colonialism and the States of Legal Education
As innovators seek to shift law training to meet a new era, there is growing awareness of the way law schools have been affected by history and social context. Those contexts include colonial legacies and their continuing impacts on race, gender and intersectional inclusion, as well as global power relations. This panel sets the scene for the rest of the conference, drawing on New Legal Realist interdisciplinary approaches to analyze the current states and possible future directions of legal education.
Moderator: Meghan Dawe
Speakers: Rachel Moran, Foluke Adebisi, Brian Calliou, Bennett Capers
Commentators: Riaz Tejani, Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
5:15-5:45 pm – General Discussion
5:45-8:00 pm – Reception and Conference Dinner
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Saturday, October 19, 2024
Milstein East Conference Center
Wasserstein Hall
Harvard Law School
8:30 am – Light breakfast available
9:00 -10:30 am: New Legal Realism & Legal Education I: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Law School Inclusion and Teaching Justice
Democratic goals like serving justice and creating fair, inclusive law schools have long featured in public statements by law schools and official organizations like the ABA and AALS. However, these statements often ignore how settler colonialism and slavery shaped the earliest law schools, building race- and gender-based exclusion into the core of nascent U.S. legal education. Those early law schools, precisely because of their longstanding history, exerted an outsize influence on paradigms of legal education and accreditation requirements. As a result, all law schools have struggled to overcome structural inequities despite perennial criticism and calls for reform. Recent empirical research confirms that this persistent problem may result from “features not bugs” in the system. Panelists also discuss possible avenues for change, drawing on empirical research and their own interventions.
Moderator: Elizabeth Mertz
Speakers: Victor Quintanilla, Meera Deo, Thomas W. Mitchell, Elizabeth Mertz
Commentators: Christopher Mathis, Emily Taylor Poppe
10:30-10:45 am – Break
10:45am-12:15 pm—NLR & Legal Education II: Pluralizing Professional Identities and Purposes
As the hidden historical and cultural sources of exclusionary structures in formal legal educational institutions become clearer, there is an opportunity to expand in new directions. This panel explores the promising possibilities that open up for legal education when professional identity is conceptualized outside of a monocultural and individual-centered vision. As NLR has long contemplated, better understandings of people in context can sharpen policy aimed at improving institutional or organizational structures. When we pluralize professional identities and purposes, we can shake loose sedimented assumptions about ethical horizons and how legal training and the legal profession “should” operate.
Moderator: Shauhin Talesh
Speakers: Eduardo Capulong, Jane Ching, John Bliss, Elizabeth Bodamer
Commentators: Russell Pearce, Susan Sturm
12:30-1:30 Lunch and Keynote
Martha Minow in conversation with David B. Wilkins
1:45-3:15 pm – Roundtable on Innovative Approaches to Inequality and Teaching:Integrating Social Reality and Empirical Research on Legal Education into Law Training
This Roundtable features law faculty who have followed the early Realist call to integrate practical training and social science research on law. Because interdisciplinary research more closely follows “law in action” than does doctrinal research, interdisciplinary training can usefully combine with other law teaching to steep law students in the realities of law and law practice. When law training confronts social reality, the inequalities of law on the ground become more centrally a part of the puzzle law students are challenged to solve.
Moderator and Commentator: Darrell Mottley
Panelists:
Swethaa Ballakrishnen: Teaching Professional Identity at Irvine
Richard Wilson: Making 303.c Walk on the Ground: The UConn Example
David B. Wilkins: Teaching the Legal Profession Course—Integrating Race and Empirics
Margaret Hahn-Dupont: Interdisciplinary Hands-On Law Training at Northeastern
3:15-3:30 pm – Break
3:30-5:00 pm – Invisible Pieces of the Preparation for Law Practice: NLR Perspectives on Clinical, Legal Writing, Doctrinal, Ethics and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy
Discussions of law school reform typically occur in silos, in which training for practice is segmented from doctrinal classroom training, technical legal writing can be segmented off from other parts of legal education, and U.S. law schools turn in on themselves so that they reinforce hierarchies that push professors from traditionally underrepresented to the margins. NLR asks what happens when we breach these traditional silos, bringing the many “ground-levels” of law teaching into conversation with each other – and with pertinent social science.
Moderator: Michele Leering
Speakers: Teri McMurtry-Chubb, Lisa Alexander, Marsha Griggs
Commentators: Jeffrey Omari, Pablo Rueda-Saiz
5:00-5:30 pm Closing Remarks
Shauhin Talesh
David B. Wilkins
Participants and Invited Guests:
| Foluke I. Adebisi, University of Bristol Law School | Pablo Rueda-Sáiz, University of Miami School of Law |
| Lisa Alexander, Boston College Law School | Susan Sturm, Columbia Law School |
| Swethaa Ballakrishnen, University of California-Irvine Law School | Emily Taylor Poppe, University of California-Irvine School of Law |
| John Bliss, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession | Shauhin Talesh, University of California-Irvine School of Law, and Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine |
| Elizabeth Bodamer, Law School Admissions Council | Riaz Tejani, University of Redlands |
| Brian Calliou, University of Calgary Faculty of Law | David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School |
| Bennett Capers, Fordham Law School | Patricia Williams, Northeastern University |
| Eduardo Capulong, University of Hawai’i at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law | Richard Wilson, University of Connecticut School of Law and Department of Anthropology |
| Jane Ching, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University | Portia Jin Xiong, American Bar Foundation |
| Stephen Cody, Suffolk Law School | |
| Meghan Dawe, The Baldy Center-University at Buffalo; American Bar Foundation | |
| Meera Deo, Southwestern Law School; Law School Survey of Student Engagement | |
| Marsha Griggs, Saint Louis University School of Law | |
| Margaret Hahn-Dupont, Northeastern University School of Law | |
| Michele Leering, Queen’s University Faculty of Law | |
| Christopher Mathis, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law | |
| Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb, University of Illinois Chicago School of Law | |
| Elizabeth Mertz, American Bar Foundation; University of Wisconsin Law School | |
| Martha Minow, Harvard Law School | |
| Thomas W. Mitchell, Boston College Law School | |
| Sindiso MnisiWeeks, University of Massachusetts Amherst; University of Cape Town | |
| Rachel Moran, Texas A&M University Law School | |
| Darrell G. Mottley, Suffolk University Law School | |
| Ewurama Okai, Northwestern University | |
| Jeffrey Omari, Gonzaga University School of Law | |
| Russell Pearce, Fordham Law School | |
| Victor Quintanilla, Indiana University Maurer School of Law |