Critical Theories, Sponsored by Civil Rights, Criminal Procedure, Education Law, Law and the Humanities, and Poverty Law

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In 2025, the U.S. President and his billionaire backers are accelerating their prior attacks on the rule of law and the legacies of the New Deal, Warren Court, Great Society, and related developments in law and society. Some scholars cognize this decades-long reactionary campaign as part of a global process of neoliberalization, autocratization, or postfascism. Others prefer terms like the Second Redemption or Christian nationalism. For a meaningful rule of law to endure, the next twenty-five years of legal education will be critical. Academic freedom is necessary but likely insufficient. To buttress democracy and governance by consent of the people, legal education will benefit from law professors who cognize ourselves as workers and organize accordingly in local unions and as affiliates of the American Association of University Professors and related formations. Beyond our typical pedagogies regarding rights, remedies, doctrines, procedures, and constitutionality, the times call on law professors to educate ourselves, our students, and the public about the sociolegal struggles that transformed U.S. democracy by birthing formal equality in the late nineteenth century and the rights revolution of the twentieth century. This panel will feature an array of scholarly voices regarding the pasts, presents, and possible futures of legal education with 2050 as a point of reference and imagination.