There is No Santa Claus: The Challenge of Teaching The Next Generation of Civil Rights Lawyers in a ‘Post-Racial’ Society

This essay takes a fresh look at the scholarship on the practice of cross-cultural and client-centered lawyering. The current scholarship explores methods of training law students to be mindful of the ways that cultural differences can impact legal representation. However, this scholarship has not addressed how to equip students to address issues of racial discrimination in light of the post-racial lens through which many view these problems. Legal educators must examine how law students’ beliefs regarding the current relevance of race in America affects their ability to represent clients who believe they are victims of racial discrimination.The essay charts a new direction of “immersion lawyering” to better prepare this generation of social justice lawyers for lawyering in an allegedly post-racial society and opens a new avenue of dialogue