Saying the Quiet Parts Out Loud: Teaching Students How Law School Works

The summer of 2020 was an inflection point for legal education’s relationship with racial and other inequities. After Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, faculty, administrators, and students spoke out with increased urgency about the need to address race in law school curricula. For example, professors sought to give race context to cases found in law school casebooks by not presenting judicial opinions as neutral statements of the law. Many law schools, including our own, formally (re)dedicated themselves to helping students recognize and analyze structural inequalities and how the law perpetuates them. Law schools focused on what their faculty and graduates could do to change the legal landscape. Whether they did so effectively was vigorously discussed in the press and on Twitter. Students were frustrated: they were asking their schools to make changes but weren’t getting very far. Students noticed the disconnect. We noticed the disconnect. This Article and the teaching methods it describes are one response to that disconnect