Institutional Antiracism and Critical Pedagogy: A Quantum Leap Forward for Legal Education and the Legal Academy

A fundamental launchpad for redeeming American society is to look to the historical and contextual goals of the Second Founding—the Reconstruction Amendments—and grasp the lessons about justice and equality for all by focusing on the principles of institutional antiracism. While our nation should deploy teaching and learning strategies at all levels of the American system of education, legal education must be out front leading the way to incorporate institutional antiracism through critical pedagogy.This article provides the historical context in which legal education developed in the antebellum and postbellum periods and up to what might be deemed the “Third Founding” represented by the modern Civil Rights Era. The article deals with the problematic anticanon of “colorblindness” as an impediment to progress in legal education and the profession to realize the power and promise of the Reconstruction Amendments, specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment. The article locates institutional antiracism in the Fourteenth Amendment and introduces the role critical pedagogy plays in fully transforming legal education by moving it to a place in which law teachers and law students are engaged in the co-creation of legal knowledge and act on that knowledge to understand their place in the world and how to change the world by dismantling systems of inequality and oppression