Home
Calendar
Clinical Workshop Program
Workshop on Clinical Legal Education
Expanding Visions of Scholarship*: Making It Happen
May 9–12, 2001
Law Clinic Directors' Workshop
May 8–9, 2001
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
* scholarship n. teaching materials, videotapes, briefs, websites, legislation, stories, and even law review articles.
Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
University of New Mexico
School of Law
Words, only words
ice cube echoes
bouncing off cold white marble.
fragments of life
filtered through shame
telling of wounds
in sterile rooms.
lawyers
no/know
not my story
re/presenting me. 1
Access to justice
Services to the needy
Pursuing a specific social justice agenda (e.g. environment, civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights)
Law reform through litigation
Law reform through education
Law reform through legislation
Judicial reform
Socializing law students to be socially conscious
Socializing law students to consider pro bono work after graduation
Making “invisible” justice issues visible to students, the bar, judges, legislators, policy makers the public
Increasing legal literacy/ knowledge about rights
Looking beyond MacCrate
Brightening someone’s life
How can sharing our insights further social justice? What forms should our insights take? What are ways to share these insights?
What are examples of scholarship that has actually furthered social justice? What did the author draw upon?
Real life experiences or theory?
How do we create scholarly agendas for ourselves that further a social justice imperative?
Feminist theory
Critical race theory (Lat/Crit, Critical Race, Global Critical Race etc.)
Genres of clinical scholarship (Theoretics of practice, difference theory, practice tools, teaching insights, etc)
Law & Literature
Traditional scholarship
Specific social justice agendas
How can we deal with the placement of our work?
Resisting the law review hierarchy
The placement game: using the reviews to leverage placement
Results of the game:
Elite law reviews often do not review articles until they get a call that it has been accepted elsewhere.
Multiple submissions: wasted paper
Wasted work
Perpetuates elitism and hierarchy
Resisting the game: One way-send only to journals, you would accept. Tell editors you will place with journal who accepts piece first, then do it.
Benefits: very quick decisions
Saves paper/ work
Takes a stand against law review hierarchy
BOTTOM LINE: DEVELOP AND SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS
1. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Testimony, 7 Am. U. Gender Soc. Pol’y 177 (1999). This poem was inspired when Community Lawyering student, Lucia Blanco and I spent the morning in Family Court and our client began to cry on the stand.