Structural Change and Individual Representation: Teaching Students to Thrive within Systems They Seek to Dismantle

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan B

Floor: Ballroom Level

Clinicians have long recognized the tension between a desire to win discrete victories on behalf of individual clients and the goal of fostering broader systemic change. A perennial and rich discussion in criminal defense clinics is the limitations of the defense lawyer in effecting that broad change, and the potential to re-conceive that role to more fully address the problems facing the communities that we serve. Idealistic students wanting to re-imagine a more just system can quickly come to feel despair when it seems like representing one client at a time within a corrupt and racist system is not serving to transform that system but merely to perpetuate it. We seek to address how clinicians can truthfully and effectively encourage our students to maintain hope in the work that they are doing as they simultaneously help their clients stuck in an unjust system while also working to transform or abolish that system. Today's social justice-minded law students, many of whom are more steeped in prison abolition literature than their criminal law professors, are not content to learn skills needed to represent clients oppressed by a racist carceral system. Instead, they seek to channel their rage into a reckoning that transcends the provision of effective representation; the remedy they seek is nothing short of a dismantling of the system. In this roundtable, six of us who work or have worked in criminal defense clinics will engage in a series of role plays utilizing the clinical method of practice and reflection to stimulate a conversation about abolition, clinical pedagogy, and the challenges and opportunities inherent in teaching students how to represent clients in a system they seek to tear down.