Hey look: it’s our first call for papers announcement: The Society of American Law Teachers, together with LatCrit, will be hosting a teaching conference at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago on September 30 and October 1, 2016. From the call for papers and panels:
In 2015, law school applications hit a fifteen-year low. The drop reflects a radically changed employment market and a prevailing view that law school is no longer a sound investment. To attract qualified applicants and respond to a changing marketplace, many law schools have embraced experiential learning mandates and other “practice-ready” curricular shifts. The plunge in applications has also prompted law schools to lower admissions standards. In turn, the admission of students with below-average LSAT scores and modest college grade point averages has created new concerns about bar passage, job placement, and prospects for longterm professional success.
In this environment, the legal academy is faced with unprecedented challenges. On one hand, pressure exists to ensure that students are adequately prepared to navigate a courtroom, draft legal documents, and exhibit other “practice-ready” skills upon graduation. At the same time, law professors are urged to cover a wide spectrum of theory, rules, and doctrine to increase prospects for bar passage. In the struggle to achieve both goals, the critical need to integrate social justice teaching into the curriculum is often overlooked, rejected as extraneous, or abandoned in light of time constraints.
To the contrary, social justice teaching plays an essential role in improving legal analysis, enhancing practical skills, and cultivating professional development. Moreover, social justice teaching can help instill passion, commitment, and focus into students burdened with debt and facing an uncertain job market. Most important, as the legal marketplace contracts, access to counsel for lower- and middle-income people continues to grow — creating a pressing need for effective and committed pro bono lawyers.
In response to new educational and professional challenges, law schools and the legal profession must join in a concerted effort to integrate social justice teaching into the classroom and expand social justice throughout the community. This conference will provide opportunities to engage in broad, substantive, and supportive discussions about the role of legal education and the legal profession in teaching students to become effective social justice advocates and the ways faculty can set an example through their own activism.
Tax law can and should have an important role in any discussion of social justice. If you want to present, proposals need to be sent to Hugh Mundy by June 15.
The Surly Subgroup 