Leanna Katz (3L)
Jackman walks into his doctor’s office. “I’m sick, doc. I’ve got anxiety, depression, I’ve been precariously housed for the past three years, and I’m six-figures in debt. I work in a profession that is meant to be about people, but I feel disconnected from others.” Needless to say, Jackman is my not-so-subtle metaphor for the mental health, financial, and academic challenges we face as a law school community.
My starting point in this article is that we go to a law school with professors at the top of every legal field I can think of, startlingly bright peers, and enough curricular and extracurricular activities to keep students intellectually and socially engaged around the clock. We also face challenges—those mentioned above, and others— which are both causes and symptoms of a weakened community.
My vision for what legal education can and should look like is one that “inspires (while being inspired by) each individual’s quest for meaningful, creative engagement in the collective undertaking of building a just society.” This is my adaptation of Professor Thomas McMorrow’s description of inspiring governance.
As members of the law school community, we are interested in building a more just society, though we hold different conceptions of justice. We look for meaningful, creative ways to spend our time. I believe this starts with investing some of our creative, productive energy on the law, on the law school, on each other, and on building our community. We need a shift towards engagement that embeds the individual in the community, and strengthens both.
We can start with small changes. For example, when the CDO opens up events in the summer, students from other law schools ask more questions during the presentations, whereas U of T students during the school year tend to approach presenters at the end to ask questions privately. There are several possible explanations, such as fearing judgment, not wanting to share answers with others, or taking the opportunity to network with presenters one-on-one. A more constructive approach would start with understanding ourselves as members of a community, and strive to benefit both ourselves and those around us.
Such small actions constitute our community and illustrate each person’s “implication in, and responsibility for, the continuous challenge of constructing norms, structures, and processes that foster each human being’s self directed pursuit of the good,” as McMorrow puts it.
There is already abundant evidence of the meaningful and creative at work— and play— in our law school. I think of events such as coffee houses, student groups such as the Food Law Club, and interdisciplinary courses like Ethics in Alternative Dispute Resolution. These opportunities push students to think about the limits of the law, including both what the law cannot do, and how we might use the law differently to deal with the complex problems our world faces.
Legal education should prepare us to use the law in a full range of settings: Big Law on Bay Street or Wall Street, rural and suburban firms, international law in Bangladesh or Geneva, legal clinics, politics in and outside Parliament, and everyday interactions like lining up at the grocery store or commuting on the TTC.
Open, critical engagement with the law should start at the outset of law school. I found first-year rigorous and interesting, but disembodying. I believe this is unhealthy for a program dedicated to processes dealing with human interactions. One example is the unrelenting focus on stare decisis without discussing the implications of its status as a default rule, what it would mean to be honest about this, and what harm this might cause. The first-year legal methods course could address this by posing such questions at the outset of our legal education, and continuing to ask such questions in our doctrinal courses.
Critical engagement with the law is not a trade-off with gaining a good grasp of doctrinal law. A solid understanding of doctrine enables critical engagement and vice versa, so that we can use the law as a tool to achieve whatever ends we put our minds to.
I suggest we each ground ourselves in understanding the law as an ongoing effort to develop fair processes for mediating human interactions. I do not propose that it fall only on the administration or the SLS to lead the way. All members of our community can make a little more space to work on improving ourselves and our community. This is easy to say, but difficult to embody since we are being groomed for a profession designed to be adversarial, and, in many places, valued by docketing time.
We are already heading in the direction of community-based engagement with the law. Mentorship is the buzziest of buzz words in the legal profession, we are doing important curricular reform, and we are working to address the challenges of mental health and financial aid in our law school.
In September, students will have a new space in which to set down roots and grow our law school community. Let’s do so out love for our community and ourselves.
