The Justice Mission of the Law Schools

A Conference on the Justice Mission of the Law Schools is timely, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words about being “a drum major for justice” offer to us a vision of that mission. They demand that we reexamine the role of the law school to determine whether we have taken into account the question of justice while ordering our institutional priorities. The title of this conference implicitly asks whether we can continue to reproduce legal culture without evaluating the impact of that culture on both the powerful as well as the powerless. Legal educational institutions cannot right all historical wrongs or solve the problems of our nation which have been caused by a particular conception of the role of law in society.

But we can play a catalytic role as prophets of justice who raise disturbing yet direct questions about the relationship, if any, between the mission of legal education institutions and the problem of justice.