Advances: Fresh Takes

FRESH TAKES

Professors Design and Teach Innovative New Courses

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t was an exciting opportunity for RACHEL H. SMITH, Associate Dean for Experiential and Skills-Based Education and Professor of Legal Writing. With St. John’s Law set to welcome its inaugural Theodore T. Jones, Jr. Fellows, she was asked to design and teach a virtual, two-week course introducing them to the study and practice of law.

“This is a group of talented 1Ls selected as Jones Fellows from a competitive pool of Black applicants,” Dean Smith says. “For the last year, the faculty has been thinking about ways to offer more classes that engage with questions of racial and social justice. And we wanted to give the Jones Fellows a meaningful kickoff to their Law School careers. So, I crafted Civil Rights Advocacy to put students in the shoes of the lawyers who argued major civil rights cases by reading and analyzing briefs written by those lawyers.”

The course provided perspective on lawyering and the work of seeking justice that the first-year students could draw on and share in their foundational classes. “In just a short time, the students saw that the cases we discussed were the result of the work of lawyers who made strategic choices about what arguments to make and how to make them,” Dean Smith explains. “As law students and then lawyers, they will have the skills to do the same thing.”

Like her faculty colleague, Professor RENEE NICOLE ALLEN was excited to build and teach a course this fall that offers St. John’s Law students a fresh perspective. In Music & The Movement: Race, Rhythm, and Social Justice, they examine how music has played a vital role in energizing social justice movements and elevating the legal and social issues facing Black people. In addition to music, Professor Allen incorporates videos, podcasts, and firsthand accounts into the curriculum. textbook, and my love and appreciation for music,” she shares. “It’s designed so students learn the legal, historical, and social contexts for the music created during each social justice movement, and hopefully take away that Black music is more than entertainment; it’s a critique of social ills, a reflection of strength, a source of empowerment, a roadmap for resistance, and a proposal for change.”

Change is also a driving force behind Feminist Theories and Feminist Judgments, a new elective created and taught by Professor ROSA CASTELLO ’06. Students in the course study different feminist legal theories and approaches and re-write seminal U.S. Supreme Court opinions from a feminist perspective. The idea, which came to Professor Castello after she started teaching Drafting Judicial Opinions two years ago, taps her own interest in gender discrimination and feminist theory and students’ desire for more courses focusing on discrimination and civil rights issues.

An anchoring tenet of the course is that judges, and the laws they are charged with interpreting and upholding, aren’t objective and neutral. “The judiciary has long been dominated by white men, and therefore many judicial opinions are written without a feminist perspective,” Professor Castello notes. “That perspective often considers embedded and implicit biases, structural inequities, and historical social and legal positions and accounts for race, class, gender, and other aspects of marginalization.”

Expressing a desire that weaves through all three of these innovative course offerings, Professor Castello says: “I hope students will begin to appreciate that law should be critically examined and analyzed and that diverse perspectives are important for many reasons, including to shape the law to achieve equity for marginalized groups. I hope they will improve their critical thinking and writing skills, both crucial skills for any lawyer. And I hope that, with this new insight and perspective, they will become the leaders and change agents we need in and beyond the legal profession.”