THE HARM OF LEGAL PEDAGOGY IN ELITE LAW SCHOOLS

Abstract

Elite law schools play a critical role in shaping the legal profession, yet they also function as sites of racial exclusion and stratification. The harm of legal pedagogy refers to the ways that law school curricula negatively impact students of color and reinforce racialized structures that impact the legal profession outside of the classroom. While the American Bar Association (ABA) has recently mandated that law schools offer courses on race, it does not require students to take them, leaving racial equity on the periphery of legal education. This thesis explores how elite law schools, particularly Duke, UVA, UCLA, and Harvard, navigate curricular reform related to race and social justice. First through an analysis of Duke Law’s course bulletins from 1970-2024 and then via a comparative study of the four aforementioned schools from 2010-2024, I find that most law school curricula have been slow to incorporate race and, when they do, schools base their reforms on public standards of success rather than an institutional commitment to racial justice. Further, using ABA data, my examination of Black student enrollment at these schools demonstrates that the inclusion of race-related courses does not necessarily correlate with more diverse enrollment, complicating assumptions that curricular reform alone can transform law schools into racially equitable spaces. In the concluding chapter, I unpack how law schools’ resistance to meaningful curricular change reflects their broader positioning in whiteness and elite status, which shapes generations of legal professionals who remain largely unaware of the law’s role in reproducing racial inequality