On Saturday afternoons, while the rest of the school is in Bora on Facebook, a group of students have been getting together to do extra readings. This September featured the first meeting of the Critical Analysis for Law Students: Tool-Kit and Read-In Group (CAL). Every second Saturday, law students and law-curious individuals from the larger University of Toronto community are invited to discuss key texts in legal thinking. The group meets for around an hour and then heads to a pub to “continue discussing legal ideas”. The meetings have included students in all years at the law school, graduate students from the Faculty of Law and PhD students from other faculties who, strangely, seem totally fine with spending free time in a room full of law students. The reading list for the sessions is not cumulative. Students come for readings they’re particularly interested in and new members are welcome anytime. The topics range from legal realism, legal education, to critical Race Theory and Law. The sessions are hosted by Professors Markus Dubber and Simon Stern in the Faculty Lounge, with occasional visits from other faculty members and visiting faculty.
The idea for the Read-In Group was born earlier in 2012 at the small group dinner for Prof. Dubber’s 1L Criminal Law class. Students expressed frustration about having intuitions about legal issues and concerns about the law, but not having the tools to express or explore them. The topic then shifted from legal education to curricula and the relative absence of discussion and critical approaches in the first year curriculum. And so the CAL was hatched, so students can bounce ideas around, and explore their legal questions without an exam at the end of the process.
“In my first year the only alternative to quietly fuming at my professors without being sure why they were wrong was to go to the law library, find legal criticism and read it during study breaks,” remarked one 2L with a briefcase. “With CAL, the criticism is found for you, broken down into chunks digestible in size and cohesiveness, and then masticated in the context of a supportive group of students and professors who care.” The emphasis is on informality, curiosity and cookies. The reading list was honed over the summer, but remains flexible and changes based on what students are interested in reading and talking about.
The Administration is excited about the project. “The CAL seems like an inspired idea because it creates a space for focused yet informal discussions about law between faculty and students, focused on the larger themes in law,” commented Dean Moran. “The reading list looks really terrific—a really interesting group of readings that would nicely help situate the classroom experience in the broader context of important intellectual and political debates about the role of law and its larger significance.”
Students are also excited about the idea for that reason. “Having a space for informal discussions with faculty and peers is pretty cool. You don’t get a ton of opportunities to spend time with students from other years and talk about more abstract stuff,” said one impressively mustachioed 2L. “And Dubber is really funny.”
Of equal importance, the CAL has functioned as an important way to make students feel welcome. “Diversity requires that everybody feel comfortable,” said the briefcased-2L. “The lack of diversity in the legal profession is probably partly due to people going through law school and never feeling welcome.” The location helps with that feeling. “In first year I wandered into the Faculty Lounge one day, drawn by the smell of uneaten food. I was told in no uncertain terms that taking that food would be theft because it was the professors’ food, and that room was a space for professors,” he said. “Now I am invited into the Faculty Lounge (by other professors) every other week to eat cookies and juice while participating in an egalitarian discussion about legal theory.”
