Healing and Reconciliation: The Clinic’s Role in Re-Imagining Power and Fostering Dignity in a Time of Polarization

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Yosemite A

Floor: Ballroom Level

The clinical seminar, rounds, and supervision provide unique opportunities to engage with students around issues of power, privilege, subordination—and ultimately, human dignity. These issues are at the forefront in this time of polarization, affecting students, professors, and clients alike. As law schools continue to seek more diversity in their classes, increasing numbers of students come to law school having had their own humanity denied through various forms of subordination. Students are often hungry for critical frameworks and tools to break down these power structures in their world. These students are often both fragile and highly motivated to explore ways to bring justice and reconciliation to our polarized world. In this session, we will facilitate discussion and collaboration on ways that clinics can consciously deconstruct and subvert these power structures. Our clinics—in the areas of Disability Rights, Domestic Violence, Civil Justice, and Women and the Law—take an explicitly critical approach to race, gender, disability, poverty, and other power dynamics in our society. We have found that, while it is possible to cultivate critical reflection in seminar, rounds, and supervision, different approaches are most effective in each context. These various approaches provide students with scaffolding on which to have conversations to explore power dynamics. Our session will provide specific examples of entry points for fostering student reflection around issues of power and privilege from a critical perspective. We will also reflect as a group on ways that our profession and clinics might propagate power structures—including in the professor/student, attorney/client, and attorney/adjudicator relationships—and brainstorm additional ways that we can subvert these dynamics in our clinical pedagogy.