Paul L. Caron
Dean





Thursday, October 24, 2024

Transforming The Law School Matrix

Susan L. Brooks (Drexel), Transforming the Law School Matrix

Law school culture emerges from the adversarial idea of law that is inscribed in the dominant pedagogy. It is reinforced by the prevailing metrics of success, which rank students through relentless public competitions (for grades, jobs, law journals, moot court, and clerkships) and provide very little opportunity for feedback that encourages students to develop more contextually defined or internally generated measures of accomplishment . . . . The culture of competition and conformity becomes an invisible but ubiquitous gravitational force affecting how students perceive the law and their place in it.

Sturm and Guinier wrote these words shortly after the publication of the Carnegie Report, another time when there seemed to be momentum toward legal education reform. They offered cautionary advice for those legal educators, me included, who still believe it is possible to change legal education culture and continue striving to transform their classrooms and institutions. As they contended back then, legal education culture continues to be infused into every aspect of what we do and how we do it, including the shared values, implicit rules, and habits of mind that shape all our interactions. These cultural elements within law school feed into and are reinforced by the culture of the legal profession, which mirrors back similar norms and values. Sturm and Guinier described this combination as forming a “cultural matrix” that resists change. They surmised that “reform cannot escape the impact of law school culture. It will either deal with it, or be done in by it.”

This essay begins with the premise that the law school matrix as described by Sturm and Guinier is still intact, and law schools, and all of us teaching and learning in them, are still entangled and ensnared by its culture of competition and conformity. It describes these authors’ portrayal of that dominant culture as of 2007 and highlights key contributions from the tremendous volume of critical scholarship that continues to be written on this topic. It also takes account of new developments and opportunities for culture change that probably were not foreseeable seventeen years ago, including the recently adopted revisions to the ABA Standard 303 mandating that law schools address issues of professional identity and anti-racism and the NextGen bar exam. In short, we have reached yet another critical moment that presents a large window of opportunity if we are willing to act courageously to implement meaningful changes at the personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels. The essay concludes by offering a blueprint and illustrations of wise practices for how we can move forward toward transforming the law school matrix in both our classroom and institutions.

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https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2024/10/transforming-the-law-school-matrix.html

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