As we reflect on the demands of the social movement uprisings of the last decade calling for an authentic transformation of the legal system and an end to state sanctioned violence and the marginal progress we have achieved in our institutions, we fear that law clinics will fall prey to retrenchment and regression. We invite participants to join us in a generative workshop where we will consider how to construct and sustain a law clinic pedagogy that reflects the vision for a new social order articulated by Black and Brown-led social movements and leverages our full resources in the service of dismantling white supremacy as it manifests in the ongoing epidemics of our time.
This workshop will open with Professor Hayat’s discussion of her article Freedom Pedagogy and the criteria she proposes as essential to building an antiracist clinical program. We invite participants to engage with the workshop organizers and each other in a discussion of the following questions, 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.
- What does an antiracist law clinic look like? What would that clinic read and assign? Who would it represent?
- How do we engage clinic students in supporting the visions put forth by Black and Brown communities for a liberatory world beyond our current legal system and cultivating their own imagination about the possibilities for lawyering towards those goals?