Power, Legal Education, and Law School Cultures

Meera E Deo, JD, PhD, is Director of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) and Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Her research merges jurisprudence with empirical methods to interrogate institutional diversity, affirmative action, and racial representation. Her book, Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia (Stanford University Press, 2019) examines how raceX gender affect workplace interactions, tenure, work/life balance, and more. Professor Deo has been a member of the California Commission on Access to Justice, consultant to the ACLU of Southern California, and Chair of the AALS Law and the Social Sciences Section. Mindie Lazarus-Black is Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Temple University. She has conducted fieldwork in Antigua, Trinidad, and the U.S. to understand how, when, and why law operates as a discourse and practice of rights and repression. She is the author of Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation (2007), Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda (1994), and co-editor (with Susan F. Hirsch) of Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance (1994). She has also published in, among others, American Ethnologist, Caribbean Studies, Law & Social Inquiry, and Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies. Elizabeth Mertz is an anthropologist and law professor; her research focuses on legal language and law school education. Her book, The Language of Law School: Learning to "Think Like a Lawyer," won the Law & Society Association's Herbert Jacob Book Prize ; it also provided empirical support for the 2007 Carnegie Report on legal education. She is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association; Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation; and John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Her current research focuses on U.S. law professors and the "new legal realism" project.

SECTION I: Legal Pedagogies in Context(s); 1. Theory and Practice, Together at Last: A Heretical, Empirical Account of Canadian Legal Education; 2. Teaching International Lawyers How to Think, Speak, and Act like U.S. Lawyers: Notes on Inchoate Power and the Imperial Process; 3. In the Law School Classroom: Hidden Messages in French Elite Training; SECTION II: Class and Market in Legal Education; 4. Legal Training as Socialization to State Power: An Ethnography of Law Classes for French Senior Civil Servants; 5. The Perennial (and Stubborn) Challenges of Affordability, Cost, and Access in Legal Education; 6. Market Creep: "Product" Talk in Legal Education; SECTION III: Invisible Processes and Images in Legal Training; 7. Language, Culture, and the Culture of Language: International JD Students in the U.S. Law Schools; 8. How the Law School Admission Process Marginalizes Black Aspiring Lawyers; 9. The Culture of "raceXgender" Bias in Legal Academia; 10. Canaries in the Mines of the U.S. Legal Academy