Nurturing the Impulse for Justice

By dwelling on doctrine and appellate case analysis we too often lose sight of the underlying assumptions behind the law and the social consequences of the law. By doing so we fail to give students even a glimmer of understanding as to what they need to know to fight injustice effectively. We spend much classroom time rationalizing the real and evading difficult questions of social justice. We do almost nothing to help our students develop any sense of justice or injustice or ways of identifying how the law produces justice and injustice.

Let me work through an example of how legal educators can alert students to injustice and give them an opportunity to do something about it in a specific context. The first step is to understand the issue as one of justice. The next step is to know what areas of law this analysis of injustice applies to. It is very easy for the law teacher to raise these issues.

Doing something about the problems is another matter. But there are ways to acquaint students with social justice work through law school programs designed to help underrepresented portions of society.