Digital Commons Network^™

Turning Stones Of Hope Into Boulders Of Resistance: The First And Last Task Of Social Justice Curriculum, Scholarship, And Practice, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

The most important and intangible aspect of teaching and practicing social justice law is retaining the hope that our efforts can translate into progressive results. At times, professors’ approaches to the subject of social justice tend toward pessimism that can have unintended negative effects on students. Thus, this Article calls on social justice professors to explicitly teach hope and, moreover, to produce practical scholarship on pressing legal issues that will help students keep hope once they leave school. This Article begins by exploring the theme of hope in John O. Calmore’s scholarship and how it interrelates with his project of …

Culture Clash: Teaching Cultural Defenses In The Criminal Law Classroom, Susan S. Kuo

Faculty Publications

In the law school classroom, the Socratic method of legal analysis removes a dispute at issue in a given case from its sociocultural context and takes the cultural backgrounds of the parties into account only when they serve the legal argument. The language of the law commands law students to siphon off the emotional and cultural content because of the enduring belief that the law is neutral and impartial. Accordingly, cultural conflicts are deemed irrelevant to legal analysis because laws are unbiased and culture-blind. This detached outlook has been termed perpectivelessness to denote a neutral, odorless, colorless non-perspective.

This essay …