“The first thing I lost in law school was the reason I came”

I came across this post at Poverty Law blog:

A student who wants to do work on social justice came to my office and after I emailed him Bill Quigley’s essay, Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice, he sent me a link to Dean Spade’s essay, For Those Considering Law School.   Both are worth reading by those considering law school — and even though in law school or teaching at law school.  Three somewhat more dated essays include Duncan Kennedy’s Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (a canonical classic), Robert A. Williams, Jr.’s Vampires Anonymous and Critical Race Practice (a favorite of mine), and my On Becoming “Professor” (mine, though it is the weakest link in this list of essays).

I’ve decided to auto-post this at the beginning of each semester to remind myself that, by most objective standards, law school is not a place that social justice-minded human beings should willingly be. And yet here they, we, are. We, teachers and students both, must struggle together to create something more out of the experience than marshaled consumption of (expensive) case books, debt-binding, and then hierarchical sorting of students for their disbursement into the hegemony. Maybe one day I’ll open a School for People Who Wanted to Go to Law School But Thought Better of It. I will call it Law School.


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