Legal Profession Commons^™

Crisis And Trigger Warnings: Reflections On Legal Education And The Social Value Of The Law, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 615 (2015), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins by understanding the law school crisis through the framework of disaster capitalism. This framing uncovers the ways in which reformers are taking advantage of the current crisis to restructure legal education. Under the circumstances, faculty may reasonably read the contemporaneous student-led movement to require trigger warnings in the classroom as an assault on academic freedom. This reading, however, clouds the water. Part II attempts to clear the confusion by decoupling the trigger-warning movement from the broader phenomenon of law school corporatization. Trigger-warning demands might alternatively be read as a student critique of traditional law school pedagogy. Especially …