On Women Professors Who Teach Legal Writing: Addressing Stigma And Women's Health

Amanda L. Stephens (St. Mary’s) & Sean M. Viña (University of the Incarnate Word), On Women Professors Who Teach Legal Writing: Addressing Stigma and Women's Health, 48 Vt. L. Rev. 237 (2023): 

Since the late 1980s, legal writing (LW) professors have been disproportionately white women because the LW field has been stigmatized as “women’s work.” As a result, these teaching positions typically have been low status and afforded with less pay and job security in comparison to tenure-track doctrinal law professor positions. Compounding—or intersecting—with the stigma of teaching LW are LW professors’ social statuses as women and/or other marginalized statuses. These statuses intersect and influence how and what they teach and the legal academy’s attitudes toward them.

Although previous scholarship has briefly addressed legal skill classes’ stigmatization, no scholarship to date has applied a systematic, feminist sociological approach to this problem. The benefit of this interdisciplinary approach is that it unveils not only the gender equity but also the health equity aspects of this issue in law schools.

Using sociological concepts— public stigma and self-stigma—this Article examines the stigma associated with LW within the U.S. legal academy and outlines possible negative consequences on LW professors’ health. Public stigma refers to negative views the legal academy attaches to LW professors because of what they teach—legal writing—and any other devalued statuses whereas self-stigma refers to negative views LW professors attach to themselves. Additionally, this Article proposes social contact—the only proven method for lessening stigma—to lessen stigma against LW and LW professors. More specifically, this Article recommends that the American Bar Association and law schools facilitate social contact among LW and doctrinal professors and the law school community by changing their policies so that LW and doctrinal professors enjoy the same rights.

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