Power Legal Education and Law School Cultures

<p>There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research, this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education. </p><p>Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical messages, showing how presumptions about theory’s relation to practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula. The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they affect law training. </p><p>Finally, this collection examines how structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal education, and the agency of students and faculty.</p> <p>SECTION I: Legal Pedagogies in Context(s); 1. Theory and Practice, Together at Last: A Heretical, Empirical Account of Canadian Legal Education; 2. Teaching International Lawyers How to Think, Speak, and Act like U.S. Lawyers: Notes on Inchoate Power and the Imperial Process; 3. In the Law School Classroom: Hidden Messages in French Elite Training; SECTION II: Class and Market in Legal Education; 4. Legal Training as Socialization to State Power: An Ethnography of Law Classes for French Senior Civil Servants; 5. The Perennial (and Stubborn) Challenges of Affordability, Cost, and Access in Legal Education; 6. Market Creep: "Product" Talk in Legal Education; SECTION III: Invisible Processes and Images in Legal Training; 7. Language, Culture, and the Culture of Language: International JD Students in the U.S. Law Schools; 8. How the Law School Admission Process Marginalizes Black Aspiring Lawyers; 9. The Culture of "raceXgender" Bias in Legal Academia; 10. Canaries in the Mines of the U.S. Legal Academy</p>