Decolonizing Rounds

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza A

Floor: Lobby Level

We seek to use clinical rounds as a starting point for teaching students to practice law in a way that reflects the vision for a new social order articulated by Black and Brown-led social movements and leverages our full institutional resources in the service of dismantling white supremacy as it manifests in the ongoing epidemics of our time. By “decolonizing” rounds, we aim to reimagine each of the traditional steps of clinic rounds—“description,” “identification,” “goals,” “solutions,” and “lessons learned”— in the image of the new social order that Black and Brown-led movements envision. One goal is for these decolonized rounds to provide an opportunity for imagination and humility to emerge during difficult and hopefully courageous conversation about racism. We would start by inviting participants to engage with the session organizers and each other in a brief discussion of what an anti-racist clinical program looks like, with the goal of developing a framework for law clinics as adaptive sites working in solidarity with the communities they serve who are moving towards transformation of law and society. We would then create breakout groups to demonstrate the value of decolonizing rounds by conducting rounds on race, through our reimagined lens. We would lead participants through the five steps of our revised rounds process, perhaps adding a new step 0.