From a sociolegal perspective, Joe Berlinger’s documentary film Crude (2009) is fascinating. It serves as a potent yet complex on-the-ground application of multiple canonical theories on the relationship between law and social change. I’ve used it in my Introduction to Law & Society course for many years, finding it very effective in the classroom. And teaching it never gets stale: well over a decade since the case began, it continues to take twists and turns, each of which make it even more relevant as a sociolegal case study.
The film focuses on a portion (2006-2007) of a massive class action lawsuit set in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The plaintiffs, a group of 30,000 Indigenous Ecuadorians and five Amazonian Indigenous groups, claimed that Chevron (formerly Texaco) poisoned their ancestral land. Claimants say the American oil company did so while mining the Lego Agrio oil field from the 1970s to 1990s, causing catastrophic environmental harm including the pollution of rivers and streams on which the Ecuadorians rely for survival. The evidence in the film is damning: we’re shown children with nasty skin conditions, interviews with grieving mothers whose young children died of cancer, dead chickens, and ponds of carelessly discarded oil waste.

Chevron denied any wrongdoing. They pinned the blame on Petroecuador, a state-owned oil company that has since taken over mining operations in the area. Adding to the film’s allure as a legal thriller, the trial literally takes place in the jungle. The parties roam around inspecting various contaminated sites. One review deems Crude “a ground-level view of one of the most extraordinary legal dramas of our time.” Students find the film gripping and are always eager to hear what has happened since.  

As a bonus for law-school-bound students interested in cause lawyering, viewers get to know the attorneys representing the Ecuadorians quite well. Particularly Pablo Fajardo, a young Ecuadorian man who at the time was just beginning his legal practice; and Steve Donziger, a Manhattan-based human rights attorney who has spent the bulk of his legal career on this case. Fajardo is depicted as reserved and at times naïve, but as we get to know him we see clearly that he’s smart, charismatic, and determined. He holds his own when arguing with Chevron’s intimidating trial attorney – a very animated tall, slender man who wears an explorer’s cap. Donziger on the other hand could come off as pushy and controlling, but it’s convincing that that he has the best interest of the Ecuadorian people in mind.

Before viewing the film, I ask my students to read materials to familiarize themselves with three different perspectives on the relationship between law and social change: Gerald Rosenberg’s (1990) Hollow Hope, Michael McCann’s (1994) concept of legal mobilization, and Marc Galanter’s (1974) classic “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead.” The film provides plenty of evidence to support each perspective. But I think it challenges each in important ways, too. 

Rosenberg’s perspective, which points to the limits of litigation for achieving social change, particularly when there’s a disconnect between societal values and legal rulings, comes out looking very convincing, especially when we consider what transpired after the film’s release. In 2011, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $18.2 billion in compensation. The Ecuador Supreme Court upheld the verdict, reducing the award to $9.5 billion. But Chevron has refused to pay. They called the verdict “illegitimate and inapplicable.” Even though it was Chevron who initially advocated moving the case form the U.S. to Ecuador, they went on to resume their legal defense in the U.S. where an appeals court deemed the verdict unenforceable. One can argue that after all these years of seemingly endless legal battles, 30,000 Ecuadorians have yet to achieve anything resembling justice.

Yet there’s also plenty of evidence to support Michael McCann’s (1994) legal mobilization model, which, in conversation with Rosenberg, says, yes, these limits are real, but we also need to acknowledge how litigation draws attention to issues and mobilizes people who come to see their hardship as a violation of their rights. To that end, the film does an excellent job depicting the case as both a legal and public relations struggle. Donziger is skilled in the latter: he pitches and lands a profile of Fajardo in Vanity Fair, which, in turn, gets the attention of Trudie Styler and her rock star husband, Sting. In the film Donziger flies Styler to Ecuador where she tours the polluted landscape and speaks with impacted people as the cameras roll. He does the same with Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa, who at the time was riding momentum from a recent electoral victory. Later we’re taken to Giant’s Stadium in New Jersey, where Sting’s band The Police play in front of a massive crowd for the benefit of the Ecuadorians’ cause. The litigation may have been futile to a degree, but it clearly did something. As I always remind my students, we wouldn’t have even been covering the case had it not been for the lawsuit and the attention it’s attracted. 

Finally, we take a look at Marc Galanter’s classic article “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead.” Galanter argues that the ‘haves’ are ‘repeat players,’ intimately familiar with all aspects of the legal process. This is in sharp contrast to what he calls “one-timers,” who enter trials without much, if any, experience. Clearly, if there’s a case worthy of comparison to the biblical struggle between David versus Goliath, this is it. My students tend to see application of Galanter’s ideas somewhat obvious in comparison to the other two, although I encourage them to think about a wide array of advantages that Chevron brings to the case (e.g., their upper-hand public relations).  

Then there’s the recent developments – namely Chevron’s all out legal and public relations assault on Donziger. The oil company sued their adversary under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, using testimony from an Ecuadorian judge who claimed – and later recanted – that Donziger corrupted the case by bribing a judge. When Donziger refused U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s request to turn over his phones and computers on account of attorney-client privilege, the judge charged him with contempt of court, a misdemeanor. Kaplan allegedly has close ties to Chevron.

After prosecutors from the Southern District of New York declined to pursue the case, Kaplan – unconstitutionally, Donziger has argued – carried it out on his own, assigning a private law firm that has also represented Chevron. Judge Loretta Preska, a member of the Chevron-friendly Federalist Society, oversaw the case. Presca was reportedly inattentive throughout the trial and showed clear contempt for the human rights lawyer. At one point she said of Donziger, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law.”

Mainstream media hardly covered the case. And Donziger, to nobody’s surprise, was convicted. While awaiting the results of an appeal, Presca refused to release him, placing Donziger on house arrest in advance of his six-month prison sentence (which was subsequently shortened as part of a Covid-related early release program, placing him back on house arrest). At the time of this writing, Donziger has been under supervision for almost 900 days, which he says is by far the longest punishment anyone convicted of this charge has ever received.

Meanwhile, the struggle continues: activists are still taking to the streets, adding “Free Donziger” to their pleas for justice in the Amazon. And celebrities – notably former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and actress Susan Sarandon – are again throwing their weight behind the cause.

I haven’t taught this course since Donziger’s prosecution, but when I do I’m thinking of expanding the unit to include material on law as it relates to global capitalism, environmental destruction, and indigeneity. This excites me, because I think we’ll be able to ask some questions that represent the frontier of law and society scholarship as the planet warms and resources grow increasingly scarce. To what extent are corporations – particularly the 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions – untouchable under current arrangements? When it boils down, does law under global capitalism actually have the capacity to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples from extractive corporations? And if such a monumental effort failed to get justice, what else can be done?

I hope you give Crude a look; I’m happy to answer questions about my experience and welcome any suggestions.

****
​
Jamie Longazel is Associate Professor of Law & Society at John Jay College and is affiliated with the International Migration Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently serving on the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) Board of Directors. He can be reached at jlongazel@jjay.cuny.edu.

I am writing from my very quiet lounge room in Melbourne, Australia. It is 3:24 am, my partner, dog and cat sleep and I am the only one awake.  Heater on, coffee in hand, I get ready to participate in our pre-conference workshop ‘Teaching in a Time of Catastrophe’ in a couple of hours.    

As I write these lines, I am located at a strange intersection between time and space.  I live in a city that, from afar, looks like a ‘success story’ in times of pandemic. Following a wave of cases last winter, Melbourne went into lockdown for a second, harsh time, for a about three months that felt like a day or a year – depending on one’s perspective. 

I recall those days, and I find myself writing that, after the lockdown, ‘we reduced the number of casualties and people infected to zero’, and feeling as if I had been conscripted and thrown into a battle with five million Melburnians against the ‘invisible enemy’ that we all know well by now.  I write triumphally, with a distinct sense of agency (we ‘chose to stay’!) – even if I (like everyone else) was also following orders and, emotionally, was captive of my own terror at the possibility that the images of death and desolation that happen afar, would happen here.  We chose to fight like everyone else, but we were also compelled and forced by the circumstances.  The flipside of this story is well known as well. Of all tolls, the emotional side is perhaps the hardest to quantify and the most difficult to express. 

During those days I experienced the ambivalence that, it seems, is familiar to many.  On one hand, I was eagerly hoping that the lockdown would actually work. I was impatiently waiting for the regular conferences by Victoria’s Premier Dan Andrews (‘Dictator Dan’, as conservative critics called him) announcing daily figures or any change to our quarantine routine – mask on everywhere, movements confined to five kms radius, only one hour of exercise allowed, and so forth.  On the other hand, during those days I settled into a routine that mechanically drove me to our home office desk every day.  I was privileged to have Sabbatical semester at about that time.  I didn’t have the chance to go overseas as I had planned, but I didn’t have to teach… so the time of lockdown became a time of writing, new projects, meetings/conferences from afar and so forth.  I did this whilst recovering regular sleep, cooking every day, and enjoying aspects of domestic life that I had neglected for some time.  Having heard some accounts from friends and colleagues, it seems this weird mix of dread and productivity, fear and rest, noise and quiet was not too unusual.  Time of catastrophe has been, over an over, a time of ambivalence (in fact, I am still grappling with this ambivalence…)

The winter lockdown’s aftermath was the expected dearth of cases and the eventual, slow, haphazard arrival at a very unusual (by global standards) situation of being able to live without the virus.  The harsh measures led to the desired outcome: From November on there was no community transmission and not even a trace of COVID-19 in our waters.  Little by little, we began settling into the routine of a lucky city in a lucky country that so many marvelled at from afar.  But this routine did not come without a price.  In addition to the toll associated with the personal sacrifices made to that end, a troubled narrative emerged where the ‘enemy virus’ was, once again, outside, foreign, belonged elsewhere.  Like those enemies that, throughout past and present, we have defined and know all too well – the others who don’t belong.  The enemy began having faces in the people who could return to Australia and carry the virus with them. The mistakes made with the quarantine program established to keep the virus at the gate and detect COVID-19 in international travellers had been largely responsible for the deadly wave that shocked Melbourne last year, so there was a strong hesitance to embrace visitors and guests.  On top of the expenses that anyone (Australian or not) should pay for quarantining, there is the often-prohibitive price hike of the flights, their unavailability, and the possibility that they change at last minute.  Thousands of Australians remain stranded overseas without being able to come home.  International students – who provide a significant part of Australian university budgets – can’t come either.  Forget about ‘non-essential’ outside traveling either, as the rules governing who can leave are also fraught.    

For some, then, we are meant to wait out the Pandemic in an artificial paradise:  No one else can come in, and nobody can leave either (with a range of exceptions that go from the very reasonable to the questionable, at authorities’ discretion…). This feeling has now hampered efforts to vaccinate the population, as many Australians (and authorities) feel there is no rush, since we can afford it.  It doesn’t matter that we isolate ourselves in the process, with all the problems this causes.  Thousands of people don’t know when they will see their loved ones again, if they will be able to assist them in case they need their presence, or even if they will be able to come back home.

I give you this background, and I start thinking about how the reality of my teaching practice during the COVID-19 pandemic has been shaped by this complex environment.  I feel trepidation and, honestly, a dreadful feeling when I think about those first weeks last year, when the pandemic arrived and we had to negotiate well-known restrictions, the preservation of our own self and well-being and, then, that of our students and colleagues.  The shock our communities of learning and research experienced shaped our initial responses – we had to go in emergency mode, that distinct ‘fight or flight’ sense that we commented last year in these conference panels. 

We had to be there for our students, but also for ourselves.  We had to strike a balance, somehow, between very different imperatives, create presents and tomorrows that had become absent, give ourselves a sense of continuity and known future when what prevailed, in all fairness, was uncertainty.  We manufactured new teaching routines out of thin air, replaced physical coexistence with virtual engagement and online learning, and grappled with so many important topics relevant for our respective courses (especially in sociolegal studies).

Here in Melbourne I did that, we did that, students did that, universities did that.  We adapted – kind of.  We muddled through and continued persisting, hoping that the thing lasted weeks, months, and then just hoping that it lasted and wouldn’t become indefinite.  Teaching in those conditions could no longer be pegged to usual formats or tropes.  The cultivation of a critical imagination, challenging narratives, discovering theory, or any other pedagogic endeavour had to grapple with these overwhelming transformations unfolding and, again, with the inner world of everyone involved in the teaching and learning communities where we carry  out our work (and effect our sense of mission). 

At the same time, as the catastrophe became the new normal, as it began trickling in with all its facets – here and elsewhere – we could (we should!) open new windows to interrogate, question, raise points, provoke, alert, discuss, discuss.  We could start processing the shared pain whilst delving into the inequalities hidden behind that common sense of tragedy.  We needed to bring back to the visible realm what had become invisible for days or weeks.  We needed to rehearse the social and the political in our classrooms and create a renewed sense of ethos that could capture the need for empathy and compassion with longstanding claims of justice.  This meant something for each of you, wherever you are located, whatever your experience was.   For some, this happened in harsh conditions, teaching in classrooms and holding meetings on campus, negotiating health risks for ourselves, colleagues and students on a daily basis.  For others, this took place in the virtual space, sorting out the frustrations of new and old technologies.

We need to be there for our students.  We need to be there for our colleagues.  We can’t lose sense of ourselves in the process. 

What does all this mean in these (still) uncertain days?

I ask myself this question, once again, this morning before our meeting, reading the news about the possibility of new restrictions being announced any time to contain a new Coronavirus outbreak in Melbourne.  The feeling of malaise, of unease has returned.  I am writing with my fingers crossed, once again trying to create some emotional room for reflecting and make sense of this ordeal.  What awaits, we keep asking?  What and how?  We live in a world where COVID-19 is still wrecking the lives of thousands of people, every day.  Where many of those victims remain uncounted and, thus, not even acknowledged.  That’s the case in India, in Brazil, in my beloved homeland Venezuela, and in many other places and countries across the world. 

The pandemic is not over, and we are far from being done processing it.

When I wake up so early it reminds me of the times studying Law in Caracas, getting ready to go to Uni in a bubble of silence, right before the shaking buses and roaring cars took over Cafetal boulevard, right before the city reminded you she was alive and hadn't gone anywhere.  However, this time at least, I won’t hear any engines or voices that replace the silent void.  I will be facing, again, the eery quiet of a city on the verge of lockdown. And I will be wishing, once again, for these times of ongoing catastrophe to be over, and soon.

Raul Sanchez Urribarri (PhD, LLM) is a Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at the Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia).  He is a member of the Board of Directors at the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) since 2018. He can be reached at:  R.sanchezu@latrobe.edu.au
 

 The Undergraduate Research Lab Brings Research to EVERYONE
The purpose of the Undergraduate (and Graduate) Research Lab(s) at the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence (ACE!) at George Mason University is to provide interested students access to a variety of research opportunities. In the Lab, our students work in collaboration with graduate students and faculty to understand the research process. There is no limit to what undergrads can do. We involve them in all phases of research from project development, to data collection/analysis, and even to preparing research for presentation at conferences or publication in academic journals. Our promise to students is that by the conclusion their time in the Lab, they will acquire at least two research skills to add to their resume. However, in most cases students leave with countless, valuable skills and an unparalleled experience unlike most other undergraduate programs.
 
Within the research Labs, we use a nested mentoring model[1] – where graduate students learn from a faculty member. As they advance in the program, they work with and train newer and less experienced graduate and undergraduate students. In some cases –undergraduate students (who have been at ACE! for a while) train and mentor newer undergraduate students!
 
The research Labs transform students into scholars. It is incredibly rewarding to witness students grow, learn, develop a passion for, and contribute to research of consequence. This blog post includes a collection of excerpts from students who work within and learn from the research Labs at ACE!.
 
Lessons and Gratitude from Lab Mentors and Mentees
 
Taylor Hartwell (doctoral student, lab co-director and mentor): Following graduation, I plan to pursue a tenure-track assistant professor position at a teaching-oriented institution, where I can prioritize teaching and mentoring, and develop a similar research lab like Dr. Rudes’ that allows students to work on research. The Criminology, Law & Society doctoral program at George Mason University is designed to prepare students for research-oriented academic jobs, so I am continuously grateful for my experience in the Lab as it is one of the only opportunities for doctoral students to gain valuable, hands-on teaching and mentoring experience under the tutelage of a faculty member. Throughout my years co-directing the Labs, I mentored numerous students in a variety of capacities – including data collection in prisons, coding qualitative interview data in Atlas.ti, and at conference presentations. This experience not only makes me a better graduate student and researcher, but also significantly prepares me for the work that I plan to do as a future professor.
 
Lindsay Smith (doctoral student and lab mentor): With intentions of becoming a university professor, being afforded the opportunity to mentor students as a graduate student is enlightening. In this role, personal growth is imminent. That said, developing the ability to effectively teach research methodologies, collaborate on publications, and translate scholarship passionately broadened my professional repertoire as a graduate student mentor. However, the real reward is felt when undergraduate research assistants get excited about data collection, are inquisitive about the implications of our research, and aspire to attend graduate school. This reciprocation produces an environment that allows productive criminological scholarship to flourish. Additionally, it is a wonderful incubator for positive mentoring that inspires future generations.
 
Bryce McCune (undergraduate research assistant, criminology, law, and society major): I worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at ACE! for almost all of my undergraduate career. I loved getting the chance to gain hands-on research experience working on a variety of projects. I came to ACE! the summer after my freshman year, as a research assistant working on the Changing the Hole Mind: Living and Working in Solitary Confinement During Reform project. Dr. Danielle Rudes supervised this project, and my work over the summer was generously funded by GMU’s Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities, & Research (OSCAR). That summer, my research partner and I developed our own project to work on in four Pennsylvania state prisons. We studied coping mechanisms of carceral residents, and we are still working on our paper - Accessing a W(hole) New Life: Carceral Resident Pathways to Coping While Living in Solitary Confinement. After that summer concluded, I continued to volunteer at ACE!, and most recently, I have been working on the I.M. Stepping Up project (funded by Arnold Ventures), which considers the National Stepping Up Initiative that works to reduce the use of jail for individuals with mental health and substance abuse disorders. My work at ACE! introduced me to the world of corrections research and reform. Without this experience, I would not have figured out what exactly what I wanted to do with my career! I am thrilled to announce that I was recently accepted into Mason’s doctoral criminology, law, and society program. I look forward to continuing my corrections research and reform efforts with Dr. Rudes as a doctoral student this fall!
 
Khanh Nguyen (undergraduate research assistant, psychology major): I worked at ACE! since January 2019. During that time, I productively grown as a researcher, student, and as a person. Using part of Taylor’s MA thesis data, I am writing an undergraduate thesis, Environment and Relationships in Restricted Housing Units: Examining Institutional Differences, in GMU’s Psychology Honors Program. My study examines how environmental settings and relationships between correctional officers and carceral residents impact those residing in restricted housing units (RHUs). I hope to inform carceral institutions with suggestions to improve RHU environments and relationships through presentations and publications of my research. Conducting this project solidified my curiosities regarding, and propelled my dedication toward working to improve, the criminal justice system. In April 2021, I will present my project at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences annual conference. With my objective to attend graduate school and obtain a Doctor of Psychology degree, such presentations will aid my public speaking skills and understanding of research in academia. Throughout my time at ACE!, my curriculum vitae has significantly improved in both its format and via additions of gained experiences and skills, including qualitative data analysis, in-depth literature searches and reviews, and coding interview transcriptions. I also received helpful guidance for completing graduate school applications. With Lindsay and Taylor’s assistance, my personal statement improved with stronger self-expression, incorporation of my research experience, and demonstration of my strengths. I was accepted into my first-choice graduate program!!! My experience at ACE! shaped me into a more educated and open-minded individual. My time in the Lab presented me with many learning and networking opportunities, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at ACE!.
 
The Lab Opens Doors, Builds Bridges, and Creates a Pathway Toward Dreams
While you may be thinking a Lab like this is only possible at research intensive institutions with adequate support and doctoral students…please stop right there! Every faculty can create a Lab, and at any institutional level with just three things:

1. a faculty member with a heart and mind dedicated to undergraduate students’ growth and development;
2. an active research agenda that includes some tasks that undergraduates can assist with (and trust us, they are capable of almost anything), and
3. at least two students of varying levels of skills/expertise (the higher skilled student will be mentored by the faculty and the lower skilled student will be mentored by their peer with more skills).

From these humble beginnings, you can and will grow it, mold it, and make it your own. Train them, teach them, mentor them, present with them, publish with them, and have a lasting and profound impact on their lives. For help setting up your Lab, please contact Danielle Rudes (drudes@gmu.edu) or Taylor Hartwell (thartwel@gmu.edu) or any of our former Lab members who have set up Labs of their own in their own universities after they left ACE! including Jill Viglione (jill.viglione@ucf.edu) and Kimberly Kras (kkras@sdsu.edu). Live, Love, Learn…and Lab!
 


[1]See the following resources for more information on the nested mentoring model:
https://www.culjp.com/blog/danielle-rudes-beyond-the-classroom-the-lab
https://www.culjp.com/blog/the-nested-mentoring-model-paying-it-forward-the-benefit-of-symbiotic-mentoring-relationships-taylor-hartwell-with-danielle-rudes
https://www.culjp.com/blog/portillo-nested-mentoring
 

In the Fall of 2020, I found myself back in the classroom.  Like all of you, it was not under the circumstances that any of us wanted.  Teaching in the midst of a global pandemic, remotely no less, meant that I needed to learn how to interact within that “Brady Brunch” screen.  I needed to learn phrases like virtual synchronous or high-flex.  These were not topics of discussion in graduate school.  Like all of you, I persevered and while I learned many lessons, one sticks out: this is about coping, not acquiescing to this temporary normal.
 
I’ve been in higher education long enough to feel that I experienced everything academia could throw my way.  I taught political science as a graduate student during President Clinton’s impeachment trial.  I taught legal studies on September 11, 2001.  I taught law and society in 2008 as the country dealt with a financial crisis.  Then along comes March 13, 2020.  None of us were quite prepared for how we’d have to become nimble and pivot, words I often used in regards to pedagogy but not in these ways.  Having taught in San Diego, California and Amherst, Massachusetts – both different places and in different times – I found myself adapting to Mahwah, New Jersey in 2007 when I came to Ramapo College.  The transition was enjoyable as it forced me to rethink some of the tropes I had used in the classroom. 
 
Let me get back to Fall 2020.  The wonderful Law & Society faculty I work with asked me to teach a course as we’re trying to cover all of our courses.  Having been in administration since 2015, my time has been limited in the classroom.  They asked me to teach Lyrics and the Law, a course I hadn’t taught since Fall 2012.  I was ecstatic.  The course involves looking at musical lyrics and connecting them to legal theory.  We cover critical race theory, feminist legal theory, jurisprudential schools of thought, all through music and with attention on constitutive theory.  It’s a provocative college course.  That is, we cover the lyrics, which are often times quite graphic.  As I’ve said since 2001 when I first taught the course, college should force you to question what makes you comfortable because in those places of discomfort lies progress.  While I would preface the possible offensiveness of the topics to the students at the beginning of each semester, I never felt that I’d be offending anyone because the topics simply needed to be covered, especially in the safe space I established.  But 2020 is different than 2001 and faculty had been telling me for years that I should be aware that some topics may be off limits.  The impact of the Trump Administration and movement towards taboo topics was something I needed to consider, they said.  I heard them loud and clear.
 
In August of 2020, as I prepared for the semester to begin, I emailed the students with a disclaimer of sorts.  I outlined that we would be discussing controversial topics, including lyrics that used the n-word and that we should all be prepared for these discussions, again, in this safe space.  To my surprise, it was not the controversial topics that altered the nature of the course but rather the stress the students were under that truly affected that semester.
 
When I write a quiz, I always write in a freebie question.  Most of the time it is some kind of joke: salmon is overrated. Please discuss.  Or what was the greatest thing before sliced bread?  That is courtesy of George Carlin.  For the first quiz, I give students a freebie that simply asks how the semester is going so far.  Historically, I have received some incredibly personal and even funny answers but post-March 13, 2020, there was a tenor of stress I hadn’t seen.  They divulged what was happening in their lives.  They talked about losing family and friends to COVID.  They talked about getting the virus or being afraid of getting it.  They talked about issues of racial unrest or the impact of Trump Administration policies.  It wasn’t the lighthearted conversations I had grown accustomed to.  Rather, they were stressed and it was impacting their learning.
 
This brings me back to the lesson: it is about coping, not acquiescing to the temporary normal.  My time back in the classroom has reminded me that we need to tell our students, our faculty, our staff, our administration – we need to shout it from the rooftops – that we’re not supposed to get good at this.  We’re just getting through this incredibly stressful and difficult time but we’ll see light on the other side and while our campuses may be different moving forward, and our mode of delivery altered, the goal remains the same: find progress in discomfort. 
 
There’s a line in Bob Marley’s “Running Away” in which he says, “every man thinks his burden is the heaviest.”  While reggae is the dominant musical genre in my Lyrics and the Law course, that line has always resonated with me regardless of its academic applicability.  Time since March 13, 2020 reminded me that the stress our students, staff, faculty, and administration have been under to maintain a campus full of vibrancy, but all done through a computer, must be considered. 
 
Since March 27, 2020, I have been sending my faculty a song every Friday.  It started as Quarantune of the Week and evolved simply to Friday Tune.  I’ve tried to send a song that motivates and creates a sense of community, that community so sorely missed since we’re all working predominantly remotely.  One Friday, Vampire Weekend captured what we were all thinking in their song, “Campus.”  They sang, “how am I supposed to pretend, I never want to see you again.”  We’ll all be back on our campus soon – some of you may already be.  I’m sure being back on campus will alleviate some stresses for our students and new ones will arise.  I’ve learned, I just need to be sure to empathize and stay focused on delving in that material that is contentious but always keeping evolution in mind. 

Aaron R.S. Lorenz is Dean of the School of Social Science and Human Services at Ramapo College.  Some of his most recent work focuses on comedy and law as well free speech issues and Colin Kaepernick.  He serves as Treasurer of the Consortium.

By Marissa Carrere, Sara Abdelouahed, Nicholas DeFranco, Becca Gullotto, Liam Harney, Clare Lonsdale, Alessandro Maviglia, and Helly Patel
 
 
“...to meditate on the value of their college experience…”
 
Marissa Carrere:  As Lecturer for Junior Year Writing in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Legal Studies Program, I teach a unit on professionalization. We practice writing personal statements, resumes, and cover letters, and we talk about how to strategically prepare for success when applying to advanced degree programs or breaking into the career field. We also look unflinchingly at the challenges of being a college student in the 21st century. We explore the myths of meritocracy and the pressure to maximize one’s "human capital." We talk about the economic realities of student debt loads, stalled upward mobility, and credential inflation, and we weigh in on the policy debates around whether universities should be accountable for student outcomes.
 
By their junior and senior year, Legal Studies students are excellent at applying the tools of their social sciences degree to the systems they are personally navigating as young adults, and they are vocal about the inequities and precarcities they face as a generation. At the same time, I am always impressed by how fiercely defensive students are of their college educations. They possess a strong sense of the intrinsic value of higher learning and the experience of being a college student, unscathed by their economic and political critiques of higher ed as an institution. Watching them discover the balance of these competing ideas is always one of my favorite parts of the semester.
 
However, when Fall of 2020 came around, in remote learning and with the pandemic surging, I felt totally at a loss as to how to teach this unit. Would they care about critiques of unpaid internships, when internships had suddenly disappeared  . . . and truly existential threats loomed? What would happen if I asked them to meditate on the value of their college experience . . . while vanquished to Zoom in their childhood bedrooms? How could I ask students to write resumes and prepare for their futures, when it was so unclear what the future could hold, or even when the future could begin?
 
As we enter a third semester in remote learning, I gathered several Legal Studies students to reflect on how the past year has affected the way they are thinking about their degrees and preparation for post-graduation plans. They generously share their perspectives below.
 
*****
 
“...when we have been living the same day on repeat for a year…”
 
We’ll open with Alessandro Maviglia, who candidly describes how the pandemic shook his sense of time and purpose.
 
Alessandro Maviglia (‘21): Probably the most notable effect of the pandemic is how it has construed my sense of time. March feels like two months ago, and summer felt like a warm long weekend. The days seem to melt together in tie-dye-like fashion, obscuring the once-understandable art piece that is my memory into an unintelligible multi-colored sludge. The parts of life we as college students typically look forward to, whether that be handing your professor your essay that you labored tirelessly on, going to that fun party on a Friday evening, or simply meeting up with a friend at a dining hall. All segments in time that help to ground us in our reality. All opportunities for us to decompress and enjoy ourselves, vanished under an invisible threat that could be lurking within a potential friend or loved one. I’m reminded of their once age-old existence every morning waking up to the same day. The same activities. The same insecurity about the future. How are students supposed to look to the future with hope when we have been living the same day on repeat for a year?
 
As a legal studies major with more time at home, I have spent considerably more time glued to the television searching for something, anything indicating an end to this fever dream. As a legal studies major, what the TV had to show me was only depressing. The might of American law was not harnessed by the country to address the pandemic in terms of a national plan to combat the threat. Senators were caught scrambling to sell stocks while insisting that the future was bright. Racism and discrimination has ravaged the country. Our capitol was besieged, and federal officers took photos with domestic terrorists. In the last year my faith in the rule of law has been shaken to its core.
                
*****
 
“...keeping my head up...”
 
Nicholas DeFranco and Liam Harney also describe a disruption to their sense of time, emphasizing the monotony and sense of indefinite “pause.” However--instructively--they each indicate how keeping their eyes trained on the long-term future has helped them overcome the challenge of the daily tempo of life.
 
Nicholas DeFranco (‘22):  The only gripe I have about learning in the age of the coronavirus is the unprecedented boredom. While the work as a legal studies major has been consistent in quality with years prior, it is difficult to get past the procrastination and outright boredom felt throughout the semester to complete work on time and follow through with assignments. I cannot place my finger on a precise reason, but learning and completing assignments from home seems to have negatively affected students’ ambition and motivation.
 
However, I have managed to assuage the negative feelings of dread and boredom I felt earlier by keeping my head up and my eyes forward. The future I have planned is still shining bright, even though the world has endured one of the darkest years in recent memory. However blurry my goals may seem in the fog of dread and confusion, my plans and vision have not changed. If anything, this pandemic has strengthened my conviction to work as hard as I can and become the person I envision. My plans to join the Coast Guard after college and work simultaneously on my law degree have not changed. Of course, my future could change in the future, but for the time being, I still have a confident long-term plan, and this pandemic has not sowed doubt.
 
Liam Harney (‘22): When this all started, I was very unhappy that so much of my life had to be put on hold because of things out of my control; my academic experience, my legal internships, living away from home. An internship at my university’s student legal service center would have been a great way for me to see how I enjoy legal work in a professional environment. I may still be able to do it in the future, but the pandemic has delayed my ability to get an early look at the career I’m working toward. However, I have also found opportunities that I would not have, had the year progressed as planned. I was always going to work between the semesters, but if we hadn’t been doing online classes, I would never have accepted the job that I’m currently at. I live and work with a college friend, providing care for three people with autism. I’m not learning a lot about law, but I am learning how to chop wood, manage a paycheck, and cook for five people at once. The skills I am obtaining thanks to this job may not be exactly what I had expected, but it's not for nothing. I have gotten back my independence, which is extremely valuable to me. And I can confidently say that I have made the most of a horrible year, which makes me proud. Not every step I take in life has to be perfectly efficient. As long as I’m pointed in the right direction, I know things will work out.
 
*****
 
“...I scrambled to keep myself busy…”
 
Going to battle against the structurelessness of the here-and-now, time emerges as a dominant theme also for Sara Abdelouahed. And, remarkably, she has managed to develop a full schedule of university and professionalizing activities, all through her laptop.
 
Sara Abdelouahed (‘22): In the spring of 2020, I was interning in Boston and living at UMass’ Mount Ida campus in Newton, Massachusetts. After the pandemic sent me back home to my parent’s house, managing my free time became difficult, but for a surprising reason: there were not enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that I wanted to do. I was shocked. Where did this sudden motivation to be productive 24/7 come from?

It dawned on me that I really didn’t like “free time” in the way that I used to, pre-pandemic. Remote learning did not have an end time - the assignments were always weighing on me long past my final Zoom call. Whenever I tried to unwind, I was reminded of the fact that I was 20 years old, spending my junior year of college in my shared high school bedroom. The lack of privacy and independence took its toll on me, and I scrambled to keep myself busy. I needed to stay productive in order to feel like I was still moving in the right direction with my collegiate career.


Now, at the start of 2021, I find myself registered as a full-time student with three remote internships and three executive board positions for university clubs. Is it a bad idea? It’s too soon to tell. But with my newfound time management skills and motivation to succeed when the odds are stacked against me, I am approaching the challenge confidently.
 
*****
 
“...anyone is bound to feel more apprehensive…”
 
Helly Patel and Clare Lonsdale both graduated into the pandemic economy, and report on how they are navigating uncertainties.
 
Helly Patel (‘20):  As the world went remote, applying to law school became even more competitive and intimidating. On a digital law school forum in the fall of 2020, the Dean of Admissions at BC Law informed us that at his particular law school, similar to others, applications have increased 80% in comparison to the previous year. With such knowledge, anyone is bound to feel more apprehensive about the whole process.  After graduating in May of 2020, I applied to many internships and jobs alike in the legal field, until I received an offer from a domestic violence agency I previously interned at. I was lucky, as we are all aware of the insinuation that law schools condemn any form of discontinuity on your resume.
 
As a double major in Political Science and Legal Studies, I was able to use the skills I acquired to create a competitive law school application to the best of my ability, but the truth remains the pandemic has created a lot more unpredictability. This sentiment is shared by a lot of my peers as we are working on applications physically separated from the resources usually available, taking the LSAT from us inside our homes, and communicating with professors and mentors via technology. Today, as I wait for my decision letters, I am left with additional questions and concerns about the long-term consequences of the pandemic along with the existing uncertainty of constructing a lucrative legal career.
 
Clare Lonsdale (‘21):  My experience has been one of rethinking and rerouting. This time last year, I was trying to apply to internships that would hopefully lead to a job in Human Resources. I had chosen HR not really as a career path per se but as a way to gain employment after graduation and avoid working in the service industry as I did in high school. My first interview was actually over Zoom at the beginning of Spring Break 2020, right as the pandemic hit. I didn’t get an HR internship, but shortly afterwards I was offered at a job at the local Alzheimer’s nonprofit where I had worked previously. I’ll be working there after graduation, during my gap year. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do after college, which I think is a pretty universal feeling for college students. But the pandemic made me realize I needed to seriously pursue an interest that I have had since I started college-- healthcare reform-- as it is needed in this country.
 
 
*****
 
“...to get out of college quickly...to stay in higher education forever.”
 
For Becca Gullotto, the pandemic prompted her to rethink the path to graduation, for herself and for others.
 
Becca Gullotto (‘21):  In 2018, my friend whispered to me that she was going to try to graduate early. It was the second week of our first semester of college, and we were sitting in an introductory lecture with 300 people. The thought of graduation seemed so far away. I told her she was crazy for trying to get it all done in 3 years. I was excited for college; I did not want to rush it in the slightest. Why would she want to miss out on the college experience? And no I don't mean that college experience, like partying and the dining hall with your friends (not completely at least); I mean the learning part. I wanted ample time to complete internships, create relationships with professors and mentors, to network, and to really understand why I was in college and what I wanted to do.


Then the pandemic happened and I started to look into how I could shave off any costs. I'm paying for college completely through student loans and I started to worry that four years of college might mean a lifetime of debt. Graduating into a recession might lessen my job opportunities. My parents have always told me that everyone will have student loans and that I should just focus on getting my education, but the pandemic has forced these worries to the forefront of my mind. It’s ironic that I’m now trying to get out of college quickly, because my career plan is actually to stay in higher education forever. I want to use my undergraduate Legal Studies degree to pursue a Masters in Higher Ed, to make a difference in college access and equity, because everyone deserves a shot at education--without having to worry about crippling debt.


Three years ago I tried to talk my friend out of cramming her college degree into just three years. Now we'll be at the same Zoom graduation ceremony this Spring.
 
*****
 
 
“...as faculty we will have to respond to reverberating effects…” 
 
Marissa Carrere:  With vaccination on the horizon, my hope is that by the time I figure out how to confidently teach professionalizing in a pandemic, it will no longer be relevant. However, as faculty we will have to keep developing ways to understand and respond to reverberating effects, as we welcome a coming generation of students who will have spent a significant portion of their developmental years in remote learning and under the collective trauma of Covid-19, with social, emotional, and academic consequences that we do not yet know how to measure.
 
The optimistic version of myself wants to believe that--in all these challenges--there is an opportunity to address some of the problems that my students could so incisively identify in the pre-pandemic experience of being a college student and aspiring young professional. Having lived through such wide disruptions to what once seemed an unstoppable pace of resume-building and self-optimization, perhaps we can rethink the ways students are pressured to be on the right timeline and hit ever-receding goalposts. Having seen social inequities so starkly lit by how the pandemic has affected different communities, perhaps we can even more powerfully deconstruct the myths around merit and personal achievement. And having mourned the loss of our time together on campus, perhaps we can reaffirm the value of higher education as a full humanist experience, that is not only about success and attainment, but is also about development of the whole person, in community with others.
 
 
 

By Claudia Mei Theagene and John McMahon, SUNY Plattsburgh
​
“Butler uses African American history… as a synecdoche for the cycling of racism and sexism throughout all of human history. Butler offers the story of Lauren Olamina and Earthseed as a parable for how we might avoid the "boomeranging" of history. Thus, she teaches us as readers both important lessons about history as well as techniques we might use to survive through the impending environmental, societal, and economic crises that are destined to evolve as a result of our current actions (or inactions)” – Marlene D. Allen
 
​What does Octavia E. Butler’s Afrofuturist novel Parable of the Sower offer to teachers and students of interdisciplinary legal studies? In this post, we draw on our experience as student and teacher in an African American Political Thought course at SUNY Plattsburgh in Fall 2020 in order to articulate how Butler’s novel can be an animating text for studying law and justice. It is not new for many of us to consider the relations between law and literature, law and narrative storytelling, or law and lived experience. With these dynamic discourses in mind, we claim that Butler’s apocalyptic yet utopian speculative fiction is a unique text for legal studies students in its ability to compel readers to reimagine their understanding of and relationship to structures and experiences of oppression, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, climate catastrophe, religion, the state, and ultimately of visions of a more just future.
 
The late scholar of African American literature Gregory J. Hampton summarizes the novel thusly:
Parable of the Sower is both a travelogue narrative and a sort of bible all in one. … In the first section of Parable, entitled "2024," we learn that America has developed new drugs, colonized Mars, and deteriorated into some kind of capitalistic by-product, where "politicians and big corporations get the bread," and the proletariat gets close to nothing. Middle-class people have been forced to surround themselves with protective walls, and the unskilled masses are left as scavengers on the streets of what was once thriving metropolitan areas. It is through [protagonist] Lauren [Olamina’s] observations and opinions about the state of her world and its gods that she begins to construct Earthseed: The Book of the Living. Earthseed is Lauren's formulation of parables that outline a religion that identifies God as change and seeks to propagate itself and humanity throughout the stars.
In this post, we elaborate how this untimely world and ethical journey created by Butler proves edifying for students of law and justice.  

Parable of the Sower will challenge students to think beyond their personal beliefs and what they know. In the long run, it can prepare them for their fight for justice; this is important for any individual looking to enter the legal field and seeking that laws should be applied fairly. Furthermore, the book expands its readers’ interpretation skills through the way it provokes deeper evaluations of daily circumstances. The novel engages numerous topics, such as religion, climate catastrophe, police brutality, racial capitalism, and so on. Discussions involving these issues often cause an individual to automatically turn towards their own views, but Butler implements them in a way that pushes readers to question how close their reality is to the dystopia presented in the novel. 

Interpretation plays a vital part within law, and specifically in constitutional law. For example, precedent refers to previous court cases and rulings that have been made to set the authoritative standard for future cases dealing with the respective dispute. When looking at major landmark Supreme Court cases and the development of the Court’s interpretation of certain amendments (i.e. the commerce clause, necessary and proper clause, enumerated powers, scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, etc.), it is essential to be able to analyze the interpretive frameworks used by successive Justices and track change over time. As time progressed and societal views started to develop, the justice’s interpretation of constitutional laws began to change as well and it was evident within the court decisions. Parable of the Sower challenges readers to decipher, analyze, and acknowledge how society has fallen into a chaotic dystopia. When engaging in judicial interpretation and analysis, those skills can be applied in order to determine whether or not there has been a significant change to the conditions leading to earlier rulings, and to the anticipated consequences of future rulings. 

Alongside building the ability to interpret different ideals, the novel will also expose the reader to oppression in a different light. As stated before, the novel addresses numerous social issues in a non-traditional--at least for many legal studies classrooms--manner. By basing the genre of the novel around science-fiction and placing the setting in the late 2020s, it opens the reader to receiving the social critique the novel presents. When issues such as racism, political corruption, and so on are presented in speeches, essays, journal articles and other non-fiction methods, people who are in a place of privilege and structural power are likely to automatically become defensive and can thus misinterpret, downplay, or ignore the message and purpose of the piece of writing. Fiction may allow a reader to reimagine their reality. For those who are privileged (i.e. males, whites, heterosexuals, able-bodied persons, etc.) reading fiction will assist in the process of acknowledging the different layers of oppression that prevail within the justice system and society overall.

To take one example of the way Butler opens up her readers to interrogating forms of oppression and exploitation, in the novel, racism and economic exploitation constitute one another. We suggest that Butler’s novel elaborates and illustrates the dynamics of racial capitalism, a theory that Georgetown philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò—drawing on the foundational work of political theorist Cedric Robinson, among others--articulates as analyzing how capitalism “came tethered to a wider set of social arrangements that tended to organise populations into sharp, vertical hierarchies.” These hierarchies “were cemented and maintained by material relations of domination” and by global “forms of social organization,” and continue to operate. Butler challenges her readers to consider how racism and disaster capitalism function together in her projection of 2020s America, a projection that reanimates past forms of oppression.
 
Here, a central moment in the first half of the book is Lauren’s diary entry about the buying out of the nearby town of Olivar by an international firm and its transformation into a privatized, hyper-securitized company town, in which people labor for room, board, and miniscule salary, with labor stratified by race. What makes Olivar’s privatization—a system Lauren calls “debt slavery” and her father calls “half antebellum revival and half science fiction” (122) possible? Lauren tells us that “labor laws, state and federal, are not what they once were” (121). 

Later in the novel, Lauren’s emergent community is joined by a multiracial woman and her daughter, at which point Lauren narrates their experience escaping from a system of debt slavery more extreme than that in Olivar (287-88). Twice, Lauren makes explicit connections between racialized economic oppression in her time and American chattel slavery (218-19; 292). Near the conclusion of the novel the members of the fledgling community discuss how there are increasingly only two kinds of labor: slaves and slave drivers; one of the only alternatives is factories on the US-Canadian border featuring terrible pay and dangerous working conditions (323-24). More broadly, Butler’s novel illustrates the ways that economic, social and environmental collapse disproportionately endangers and exploits BIPOC, and how the logics of these large-scale crises are racialized; this is especially significant for thinking through the racialized impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel asks us as readers to consider all of this on both a structural and experiential level, provoking us to consider how we see racial capitalism operating in our own world.

Butler connects her interrogation of racial capitalism with a critique of policing as practiced in the context of deregulation and privatization. Lauren narrates police in the universe of Parable as responding late to any calls from impoverished areas (71); as requiring payment to perform even perfunctory investigations of crimes (19; 71; 316-18) as planting evidence in order to “solve” cases (114); as stealing from crime victims (246); and as at best doing nothing to redress—and frequently exacerbating—the ever-present violence committed against poor and racialized communities (51; 229; 236-37). The way Butler ties police violence to broader socioeconomic collapse resonates with analyses in the framework of racial capitalism. The novel thus offers the reader a speculative standpoint on our contemporary debates about race and police violence, a standpoint offering both a systemic critique and an experiential literary account of racialized policing.

These are not the only ways that Parable of the Sower speaks to issues we are likely engaging in our classrooms. The novel also provides routes of entry into considering Black feminist analyses of ecology and environment, intersectional perspectives on disability, migration, race, and capital, feminist theories of power, the gendered and racialized body, and other pertinent questions. More broadly, Butler’s critique of the present and of the future draws on histories of racialized and gendered oppressions to examine time as cyclical, thus “denot[ing] the violent nature of the spiraling of history, especially for African Americans and other marginalized groups.” This has the effect of compelling us to question received notions about constant progress and linear development, and to wonder what dynamics, institutions, and oppressions in our present are leading us to catastrophe. Crucially, however, through Lauren’s cosmology-as-ethical-community Earthseed, Butler also articulates a vision of a just future that breaks out of historical, sociopolitical stasis to imagine what an intersectionally-minded human and environmental flourishing might entail, and what new worlds might (or must) be possible.  

Amid the discussions we are having in our classrooms about racism and racial justice, COVID-19, climate catastrophes, demagoguery, the supposed breakdown of liberal democracy, inequality, individual rights, and the state, it enriches the analysis and critique of students and teachers alike to think with Octavia Butler.  
 
 
Claudia Mei Theagene is a senior at SUNY Plattsburgh, majoring in Political Science and minoring in Africana Studies and in Legal Studies; John McMahon is Assistant Professor of Political Science at SUNY Plattsburgh and a member of the CULJP Board of Directors.

This semester, I am teaching a virtual course titled Law, Power, and Inequality. The course is part of the General Education program and a required writing-intensive course for the Law and Society major. The class draws students from majors across campus, including Accounting, Biology, Business, Communication Arts, Computer Science, Music, Nursing, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Law and Society. While the academic diversity in the classroom brings important vantages to examining socio-legal issues of our times, it is a tightrope in terms of balancing the width and depth of materials. The assigned readings, class discussions, and assignments focus on structural inequality and power in society using historical and contemporary cases; readings for the class include Marx, Weber, Foucault, the1619 project, Judith Lorber, Kimberley Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, Ta Nehisi Coates, and case law such as Craig v Boren, US v Virginia, Loving v Virginia, Brown v Board of Education, Shelby County v Holder, and the Affirmative Action cases.
Transitioning this course to the virtual delivery mode, as one would expect, has been challenging, especially amid the pandemic and deepening inequities, civil uprisings following the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the campaign for Defund and Abolition, RBG’s death and the nomination to the Supreme Court, and the Presidential election and disinformation campaigns. In preparing for the virtual class, I meticulously reviewed teaching blogs and best practices in online learning to create an active student learning environment in the virtual context. I front loaded the course with readings and assignments, with the hope of providing structure and organization to our everyday uncertainties. As much as I have enjoyed the well-organized structure, what I have learned over the semester is the importance of reflexive pedagogy, which is premised on providing students with agency and active learning outside the classroom. At the same time, I have found inviting students to apply theoretical questions to address a social problem, can be particularly supportive.

The reflexive teaching strategies that I have adopted in this course have been open conversation time before class, engaging with news, and discussion posts on the readings on Perusall. The open conversation time has been beneficial as it has enabled me to create informal office hour conversations and get to know students outside of class and their interests. Students have often brought their reflection about news and their lived experiences to these open conversations, which has helped create a community. I have used the open conversations as a starting point for class, summarizing it for those who missed. Among the many online tools, I decided on Perusall to annotate the text and add reflection on the readings. This format has enabled students to engage with the text and share their analysis and reflection on the reading. The annotation assignments, in addition to reading reviews, helped build a community as students engaged with peers in unpacking complex ideas. It has generated an ongoing conversation among students on the readings and their observations, in ways that cannot be captured only in class discussions. Besides, based on student reflections and interests, I have occasionally set aside time to discuss the elections (most of my class voted for the first time) to build connections with the readings and policy debates. These conversations resulted in the class designing their assignment in the second half of the semester, in lieu of my preplanned class debates.

Intrigued by the New Jersey ballot on recreational marijuana, students suggested that they would like to do a class-project to examine the ballot’s implication on student life. The question of race and criminalization of drugs has been part of an ongoing conversation in class, especially in the context of BLM and policing, and detentions. Students had enjoyed a guest lecture by a detention attorney from the American Friends Service Committee on the precarity of immigrants’ rights and the detentions due to drug possessions. Given the approved ballot measure, it naturally caught students’ attention, and they had many questions that came up in our open conversation time before class. Even so, I was hesitant to change my preplanned debate assignment, I relented because I saw this as an opportunity to build connections with readings and their environment, teach about race, ethnicity and the law, and policy-making process the college, state, and federal level.
I have been most impressed by this demonstration of student agency in designing the assignment and the enthusiasm for research. The collaborative assignment, as it developed, has been scaffolded in stages. The first stage was a phase of exploration- we invited the Director of Student life to our virtual class to speak about college-level policy-making process. I created a  discussion forum for students to share their thoughts and generate questions about federal, state, and college policy on recreational marijuana, criminalization of weed, implications of college policy on student life, ballot measure and the weed economy, etc. Students worked collaboratively to assort questions into different categories and worked in teams to focus on different jurisdictions. Based on the discussion posts, I drafted the assignment on the New Jersey ballot on recreational marijuana and its implications for student life and created teams to focus on specific areas. I used this opportunity to invite students to apply the theoretical framings we had learned in class to the ballot measure and create recommendations for college.
​
The second stage of the project was research. Student teams have conducted primary research on federal policies, marijuana bills in NJ, the ballot measure, interviewed student club exec. members on campus, interviewed administrators and public safety, etc. Students reviewed the literature on the criminalization of marijuana and policing of minority communities and have also read college policies in states where recreational marijuana has been legalized. Students have followed lobbying groups in New Jersey and also considered the demography of the college. Given the limited time and scope of virtual research, they have been cognizant of the research process’s limitations, which has led to interesting reflections on why access to some data is complicated.

The final phase of the research is writing the report for the Office of Student Conduct on campus. This is ongoing, but from drafts that I have had a chance to review, it is promising. What I have enjoyed in this exercise is active learning and collaborative exercise. It has encouraged critical reflection within their academic and personal lives and also given students agency. Student posts have led us to consider legal pluralism, criminalization, construction of legality and illegality, etc. Given the class’s demography, the insights from different disciplinary perspectives that students bring and their lived experience have enriched the research process, no doubt. Although they are still working on the report, the enthusiasm, research, teamwork, and ongoing reflection is impressive. Admittedly, this process has its success and limits—but it has undoubtedly allowed for us as a class to analyze patterns of exclusion and inclusion and an opportunity to create academic knowledge to be shared outside the classroom.

Sanghamitra Padhy is an Associate Professor of Law and Society at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her teaching and research focus on law and public policy, environmental justice, human rights, international law, and sustainability. 

Written by: Luciana Batkay, Alexa Barisano, and Luis Rodriguez
Current Research Assistants: Luciana Batkay, Alexa Barisano, Yara Chabchoul, Stephanie Diaz, Rachel Kuong, Yodelsi Marti, Luis Rodriguez, Brenda Salas, and Elizabeta Syku​


The Legal Disruption Project (LDP), previously known as Food for Thought, has been in progress for almost two years. The project is a research study dedicated to learning about the problems in the communities and everyday lives of John Jay Law & Society (LWS) students, often perpetuated through legal institutions (law enforcement, lawyers, federal and state-level legal framework, etc.). Data is collected by LWS student research assistants through interviews with other LWS students in small focus groups. These interviews are then transcribed and coded, all by students. Legal Disruption, at the beginning, was first run by four paid research assistants.

In the Fall of 2019, LDP became a class that students could take for credit, resulting in additional assistants. Since then, multiple focus groups have been run but some changes have been made. Through the fall of the 2019 school year, we found that enticing students to come to focus groups during their free time was extremely difficult. In order to solve this for the Spring 2020 focus groups, we planned to hold the focus groups in LWS 225 classes, as this is the research methods course for the major and could provide them with a learning experience as well. However, this plan did not come without its own set of obstacles, including finding spaces to reserve, figuring out how to give students a choice to participate in our study, and how to disperse the time and location to those students. We managed to overcome all these obstacles, but unfortunately, because of the COVID-19 outbreak, no focus groups were run. Now, with the transition to distance-learning, we have managed to not only schedule our focus groups during LWS 225 classes, but on Zoom as well. We’ve been working the kinks out of online focus groups, but anticipate them to run smoothly in the next upcoming weeks.

We hope to find common themes throughout the disruptions people are mentioning. These themes could help the project in the long run, when understanding the gaps between the law on the books and the law in action. Laws are created to help and support the same people we are interviewing, yet many of the disruptions in their lives are caused by the same laws created to protect them. We hope through coding and gathering more interview data we can find a reason for this gap. Some of the codes we currently use come directly from LWS 200; Intro to Law and Society course. With the data gathered we form connections; themes that allow research assistants to further understand the problems students face. We hope through coding, our project will become more than just a data set of interviews, but instead a project to truly help explain the reason laws are disrupting citizens' lives.

Our experiences have varied during this time. Many of us have tried to find our niche in the process -- from learning to balance how much we talk in relation to how much we listen, deciding whether to be the lead or secondary RA, to discovering if we can efficiently transcribe after each focus group. Nonetheless, it’s also been a learning experience in its own right. Research assistants have found textbook ideas such as gentrification come to life. We’ve learned new levels of empathy as we hear different stories of immigration and LGBTQ+ experiences. The idea of intersectionality becomes real as different identities overlap in each interview. With interviews done in Spanish and Albanian, we expand our context and understanding through students with unique experiences with systems of law (cultural/federal). Terms like legal pluralism manifest themselves, especially with the enhancement of the question allowing for more experiences to be gathered. The biggest experience for us as research assistants has been seeing the relationship between law and society come to life as we lead The Legal Disruption Project into new territories as undergraduate students.

​Additionally, from LDP, a student club at CUNY John Jay has been born. The idea of Legally Conscious as a club at John Jay was thought up in the Fall of 2019 by Luciana Batkay and Joshua Rodriguez-Valenzuela. Both students are Law and Society majors who were inspired after spending a semester as research assistants on The Legal Disruption Project. The Legal Disruption Project inspired them by showing them first hand the different socio-legal issues that other students face, as well as how little representation Law and Society has in schools where the content of the courses are beneficial. They decided that our community at school needed an informal space to talk through these topics and problems with peers, in hopes that conversations would not only create a community amongst Law & Society students, but also create a better understanding of how law and society actually interact in real spaces and lives. In the Spring of 2020, Legally Conscious was officially made a student club on campus. It has created a community among Law and Society students and produced a space that allows for collaborative conversations. Around the same time as its conception, Luciana and Joshua began bouncing around the idea of making a more encompassing Legally Conscious. It was then that they, with help from Professor Jean Carmalt, contacted CULJP with the idea of creating a national society for Law and Society students, modeled after Legally Conscious. The goal of this would be to bring Legally Conscious to other schools and create a network of Law and Society students and mentors, something that has yet to be accomplished. Among a variety of recreational activities like game nights and movie nights, Legally Conscious has already had discussions on topics such as the morality of gentrification and the history of police reforms in New York City. We find that it’s educational in it’s own way to hear other people’s points of view and to tell a story that might help others understand a new concept or interaction. The goal of Legally Conscious National would be to expand these collaborative conversations to other areas in order to continue educating each other and create a network of Law and Society students, scholars and teachers. 



Luciana Batkay is in her senior year at CUNY John Jay. After graduating with a undergraduate degree in Law & Society and a certificate in Dispute Resolution, Luciana plans to go to law school and pursue a PhD in Economics. Alexa Barisano is currently a sophomore at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is actively pursuing a Law and Society degree and a possible English minor. After graduation she also plans to attend law school to be a criminal defense lawyer. Luis Rodriguez is a Dominican immigrant in the Bronx. His inspiration are the women in his family who inspire him to be free, happy, and wise.

This blog presents teaching strategies that are conducive to creating community and cultivating learning in both face-to-face and online courses.  In mid-March 2020, many instructors found themselves scrambling to convert their in-person courses to an online format.  This blog post suggests a blueprint that is conducive to either in-person or remote instruction; such a blueprint is particularly important given that the 2020-2021 Academic Year will likely require instructors to pivot to online instruction at some point in the coming months.
 
Clear Structure
 
            All courses benefit from a clear organizational structure.  This goes beyond having a clear syllabus and grading rubrics.  This entails leveraging your institution’s learning management system (LMS), typically Blackboard or Canvas, in such a way that each week of the course is clearly displayed. For example, my Blackboard course creates separate modules for each week of the course.  When students enter our Blackboard course, the left-hand menu shows the following tabs: Syllabus, About the Instructor, Watch Me First (which contains a Kaltura video overview of the syllabus), Course Reserves, and then a module for each week of the course (e.g., Week 1, Week 2, etc.).  Moreover, each weekly folder contains the following sub-folders:  Read, Watch / Listen, Lectures, and Assignments.   This blog post will circle back to the information that is contained within those sub-folders within the following paragraphs.
 
Blackboard / Canvas
 
            My syllabus mirrors my Blackboard course structure. For example, within Week 1 of my course, my syllabus has the following sections:  Read, Watch / Listen, Lectures, and Assignments.   The first sub-heading, “Read,” is self-explanatory.  Within the “Watch / Listen” folder, I assign YouTube clips, podcasts, movie trailers, music videos, and other multimedia that align with that week’s learning content.  The “Lecture” folder contains a PDF of the Google Slides for that week’s lecture; for online courses, the “Lecture” folder also contains a video of that week’s lecture. Finally, the “Assignments” folder contains a place where students can submit a Discussion Board post or complete an assessment, such as a quiz, test, essay, or other assignment.
 
Encourage Dialogue
 
            One of the biggest challenges many instructors encounter when pivoting their courses from in-person to online is how to create community and encourage dialogue in an online setting.  This section will discuss three methods to encourage dialogue in either in-person or online courses: PDFs of slides, Reflection Questions, and Discussion Boards / FlipGrid.  
 
            PDF of Slides
 
            All my courses use slides, regardless of whether they are online, in-person, synchronous, or asynchronous.  The slides meet four pedagogical and practical goals.  First, the slides enable me to institutionalize course content. This is particularly helpful for instructors who have high teaching loads and thus have to pivot from one course to another. However, it is also helpful for
instructors with lower teaching loads, who might be asked to teach a course they have not had for several semesters.  Second, the slides facilitate pedagogy that draws from the Socratic method and from active learning; for example, in addition to drawing from the “Watch / Listen” content on a syllabus, the slides can also feature additional multimedia content that allow students to dive more deeply into certain topics on their own time.  Moreover, if students are less talkative in a particular class, the multimedia slides can provide built-in activities that instructors can leverage to spark discussion in meaningful ways. Third, the slides make it easier for a course to be taught either in-person or online, as instructors can use their slides to record and upload lectures to Blackboard / Canvas.  Fourth, students can use the slides as a study guide; I give students PDFs of my Google slides for this express purpose.  The below paragraphs address how I structure my slides to meet the four aforementioned pedagogical and practical goals.
 
First, I choose a different template for my slides for every week of the semester. Many students love this, as it adds excitement and variety to the course.  As one of my students once told me while preparing for an exam in my Western Legal Tradition class, “I visualized the information on the slides during the exam; in my mind, I thought, “Rome is Red” (because the slides are red), and I could see the answer.”  For visual learners, having slides with different color schemes for each course units can be very useful. I find that Google Slides performs this role in both my online and my in-person classes; this is even true for my asynchronous classes.  Google Slides has a wide variety of templates available online; many individuals even share their own, self-made templates, which you are welcome to use as long as you give credit to the original source. 
 
Second, my slides are built upon the Socratic method.  The first slide will contain a few open-ended questions, and the second slide will contain a short answer to those questions.  I use the first slide as a way to spark conversation; the second slide then gives a brief answer.  I will bold, highlight, and underline key words on each slide; students with different visual abilities may not be able to differentiate the highlighted text from regular text, but they can see the bold or underlined information.  This method not only encourages students to answer questions in class, but it also assuages anxiety around exam time, as students have a study guide built into the course.  I repeat this format of “question slide, answer slide” for the first six slides, before I move on to a “multimedia slide” (discussed in the next paragraph).
 
Third, my “multimedia slides” incorporate the “Watch / Listen” items on my syllabus.  For example, the movie trailer “Marshall” features a clip where then-NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall says, “We’re not slaves now, are we? We’ve got weapons we didn’t have before – we’ve got the law.”  I then ask students if they agree or disagree with this statement.  Is the law a weapon? If so, who has the authority to use it, and who is oppressed by it? Sometimes I revisit the same movie trailer multiple times a semester, pulling different themes from course readings, such as “the law and social change,” “critical race theory,” or “legal consciousness.”  I often include two or three “multimedia slides” after each set of six “question / answer slides.”  The multimedia slides can also highlight content that is not in the syllabus, but that is relevant to the course content; for example, I might include a link to an online documentary with several reflection questions that students can choose to watch on their own time as a way to deepen their knowledge in a particular area.  By organizing my slides in this manner, I am able to respond to different learning styles, while also covering the course content; moreover, the slides allow students to deepen their knowledge in different areas, should they choose to do so. 
 
Reflection Questions
 
Each week of my syllabus features “Reflection Questions” based on the assigned readings and multimedia content.  This gives students guidance about what to focus upon in the required weekly materials, and helps them identify important themes across different units of the course.  As an added incentive, I tell students that Reflection Questions might be a future exam question or reflection paper topic.  In addition, my Google Slides often include a few of the reflection questions, which gives students the opportunity to prepare for class discussions in advance.
 
Discussion Boards / FlipGrid
 
Online asynchronous courses are perhaps the most challenging instructional format for purposes of creating community and encouraging discussion.  I find that a mixture of discussion boards and FlipGrid posts help to meet these objectives.  Both of these tools have different pros and cons.  Discussion boards allow students to practice their writing and critical thinking, while reflecting upon the thoughts and views of their peers; however, they can be time-consuming and anxiety-inducing for students who struggle with writing.  By contrast, FlipGrid is a sort of academic TikTok; students can choose to post a video or audio-recording of themselves responding to reflection questions.  Students tend to have fun with FlipGrid, which has multiple filters, stickers, and other effects.  Since FlipGrid allows you to make audio-only recordings, it allows students to decide whether or not they wish to disclose their home environment.  Moreover, some learning management systems, such as Canvas, have FlipGrid built into them as an optional instructional tool.  By alternating between discussion boards and FlipGrid, you can encourage students to practice their writing and critical thinking skills, while also having them practice their verbal articulation of course concepts, just as they would in a live classroom setting.  In addition, for both discussion boards and FlipGrid, you might consider having an optional “student space” that is ungraded for students to communicate with one another.  
 
Worksheets
 
            Worksheets can be a powerful tool to encourage in-class discussions and to help students prepare for exams or papers.  For my in-person courses, I have students pick up a worksheet as they enter the classroom.  For my online courses, I post worksheets in their own folder in Blackboard’s left-hand menu.  For my in-person courses, I arrive to the classroom a few minutes early so that I can play a Spotify playlist with songs chosen by students.  This creates a welcoming environment; students know that their “jam” might be playing, and the worksheets prepare them for some of the questions that will be in the lecture slides.  This allows students to refresh their memory about that day’s course content, and to think about their answers to particular questions.  This is a particularly powerful tool for students who may be shy or for whom English is not their first language, as it allows them to write down their answers to in-class questions, making them feel more prepared and empowered to speak up when the class officially starts.  My worksheets occasionally have sections where students can propose exam questions, giving them agency and control in the course.   At the end of the class, I collect all of the worksheets; I do not grade them, but instead, I skim them to see how well students have grasped that week’s course content, and whether I need to review anything in class for a second time.  I then return the worksheets to students for them to use a study guide. 
 
Conclusion
 
            The above-listed teaching strategies can be leveraged in either in-person or online courses.  They are conducive to different academic disciplines and class sizes.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these instructional strategies likely prompted a response from you, the reader – you may have thought of additional pros or cons to these strategies, or you may have thought of entirely different strategies.  If so, then this blog post has served its purpose;  it has sparked conversation about best pedagogical practices, and has hopefully opened avenues for additional dialogue on creating community and cultivating learning.

Hillary Mellinger is an instructor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at American University. Her research focuses on issues of social justice and inequality, particularly as they pertain to immigration policy. She can be contacted at hillary.mellinger@american.edu.

Hillary Mellinger is an instructor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at American University.  Her research focuses on issues of social justice and inequality, particularly as they pertain to immigration policy. She can be contacted at hillary.mellinger@american.edu. 

It is possible to get undergrads to fall in love with “no PowerPoints”. It is also possible to get them to grow as writers in a content course. For the Fall of 2019, I was teaching Law and Society, a 300-level sociology class at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB). The 70-student section primarily consisted of juniors and seniors. On the first day of class, I polled the students to see who had the intention of going to law school or graduate school. Over 80% responded “Yes,” and there were a handful of “Maybes.” This reaffirmed my decision to structure the course as a “mini grad class,” both in terms of content delivery, and as an opportunity to improve their writing.

With 22,000 undergraduates, UB is similar to other large, R1 institutions. Lecture halls, PowerPoints, and Scantrons are the default for much of an undergraduate’s time here. Writing assignments may be completely absent from many classes, or if assigned, graded quite liberally. These assignments usually do not offer much by way of feedback or growth opportunities for students. To my mind, churning out underprepared, incoming graduate or law school cohorts is a royal disservice to both the students and the programs.
I opted for a grad-style course approach, which used no PowerPoints, no exams, and no textbook. And, no laptops or tablets were allowed (yes, you can probably hear the groans on the first day of class in your mind). I provided articles and scanned chapters to Blackboard. I was forthright with the students on the first day; if they wanted to go to – and succeed in – law school or grad school, they had better get used to this style of class. Instead of a single term paper, I opted for an incremental paper scheme, to both assess their content comprehension, and help them grow as writers.

This incremental paper approach is a hybrid of growth and proficiency models, and loosely based on Vygotsky’s (1978) Gradual Release of Responsibility. While still assessing their understanding of the material, the papers themselves increased in length and point value, and were graded more stringently each time. There were four short papers throughout the semester, and one final paper due at the end of the semester. Paper 1 was 1 – 1.5 pages in length; Paper 2 was 1.5 – 2 pages; Paper 3 was a firm 2 pages in length; Paper 4 was 2 – 2.5 pages; and the final paper was 6 pages, plus a reference page. The grading was 50, 75, 100, 150, and 500 points respectively. The prompts for each paper varied, but allowed students choice or flexibility in their responses. Paper 1 allowed for ungraded/low-penalty feedback, and also provided me with a baseline for their individual and collective writing aptitude. As long as they put forth solid effort responding to a prompt that gave them lots of free space to connect course material to their own lives, they received full credit. However, their papers were marked heavily with corrections and notes about spelling, grammar, and structure. I used a “two ink” strategy: green ink for positive comments, blue ink for neutral or corrective comments. Paper 2 saw point reductions for major or repeat grammatical errors, and so on, and so forth with each subsequent paper. The final paper was held to very high standards for spelling and grammar, format and structure, and content comprehension.

Because the course material was delivered through peer-reviewed journal and law review articles, and academic book chapters, holding a discussion-based and paper-based semester allowed immediate engagement and clarification on complex concepts (i.e., their first exposure to legal consciousness, or the disputing pyramid). While a PowerPoint-style lecture class may drive recall and rote definitional regurgitation, is an undergraduate who has never encountered legal mobilization before really going to have an “a-ha!” lightbulb moment in that setting? By the time they completed the first paper, students’ responses showed that they were on board with this style of class; and that they understood and appreciated how our discussions and writing assignments were opportunities for them to explore their own thinking. Since the papers allowed students some flexibility in their responses, or required them to connect concepts to their own interests/experiences, the discomfort with new or difficult material was softened.

In addition to the assignment format and schedule, certain classes were designed as workshop days. In one class I covered how to efficiently extract information from peer-review or law review articles; another was a half-class overview of ASA and APA citations; another session was dedicated to an in-class write and ask questions day for their final papers. These were the moments where I overheard the, “I really like getting to write like this,” or, “This is actually a fun paper idea.” Paired with mid-semester and end of semester evaluations, it was clear that the students came around to the no PowerPoint, “mini grad class” environment.

I was utterly impressed with their growth by the end of the semester. While grading their final papers – a prompt requiring them to take a stance, formulate an argument, and provide evidence for the course throughline question, “Does law shape society, or does society shape law?” – I was so proud of how well their skills had developed. Their writing was noticeably stronger and sharper, and their ability to make claims and incorporate concepts stood out. It is important to note; this model may not be appropriate for every institution or situation. 70 students are about the maximum I would feel comfortable getting away with this as an unassisted solo instructor. However, if anyone teaching undergraduate Law and Society or Sociology of Law wants to use this approach, please do. There is a bit of a “rip the band-aid off” curve at first. But, when presented as a way to prepare students for the rigors of graduate or law school, and that you are actively committed to helping them grow as writers, the approach was successful in my experience.

Zaque Evans is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His interests include all realms of public policy, urban/spatial sociology, political economy, and media. His current research projects are focused on media framing of the 2017 Tax Cuts, and where urban and economic redevelopment funds are distributed across Western New York. He can be reached at zacharye@buffalo.edu.