Sessions Information

  • April 28, 2025
    1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
    Session Type: Concurrent Sessions
    Session Capacity: N/A
    Location: N/A
    Room: Harborside Ballroom B
    Floor: Fourth Floor

    This session addresses a multilayered problem: in most US law schools we are US-centric in how we teach and address legal issues. This approach centers whiteness and fails to include indigenous legal systems within the US. It prevents us from seeing our own laws and society through another perspective and decreases our chances of learning from other legal systems. We discuss the impact of this US-centric lens. Tia Ebarb Matt shares her experience teaching at clinics in the Southwest United Kingdom where she engaged in a process of decolonizing those clinics with students and members of the community.  She draws from her perspective as an enrolled member of the Choctaw Apache Tribe of Ebarb. Susan Felstiner shares her experiences working with the Global Alliance for Justice Education and with clinicians from Ukraine. Gillian Dutton describes the work she has done with colleagues in Morocco and the evolution of the Transitional Justice Legal Exchange to include work with Northwest Tribal Courts. We also hope to hear from the student perspective. In providing guidance on how to decenter the US in our clinical pedagogy, we review topics such as trauma informed interviewing, wellness, global conflicts, cultural humility, bias, working across language, and restorative justice, sharing techniques for decentering the US in what and how we teach. Drawing on two years of global lightning round sessions and our experiences in international collaborations, we describe how to review your clinic and externship course materials to revise current topics and introduce new ones. This work increases awareness of intersectionality and solidarity for ourselves and our students and helps us to understand privilege, oppression, and trauma in ways that uniquely enrich our teaching. Participants will take back methods to decentralize the United States in our clinical pedagogy, and international externship and clinic collaborations.

Session Speakers
Seattle University School of Law
Concurrent Session Speaker

Oklahoma City University School of Law
Concurrent Session Speaker

Session Fees

Fees information is not available at this time.