Voicing Differences (Comment)

Jane Aiken and Kimberly O\u27Leary undertake the difficult work of developing specific approaches and techniques for taking account of characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, dis/ability, and sexual identity in clinical pedagogy. Carolyn Grose uses outsider narratives and popular culture to challenge the pre-understanding of students, and to assist them to accept client stories as true and valid. Focusing on the professional value of striving to promote justice, fairness, and morality identified in the MacCrate Report, Professor Aiken exhorts us to promote justice by unmasking privilege, the invisible package of unearned assets--about which I (we? or you?) was meant to remain oblivious. She argues that the best way to teach about justice is to provide students with the opportunity to exercise judgment. Using adult learning theory, Professor Aiken demonstrates that disorienting moments can bring the meaning schemes of students into jeopardy and that students can, with time for exploration and reflection, reorient existing patterns for interpreting the world. Professor Aiken provides examples from both her clinical and traditional classroom teaching experiences of means of creat[ing] opportunities for learners to use their own sense of justice and finding openings within traditional legal analysis for discussions about justice, privilege, and difference

Commencement Address, CUNY School of Law

Who we are, how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen, what we value, how our memories connect us to specific histories in specific places — we communicate this information best through narratives. In Spanish we sometimes call such stories cuentos — an accounting. I encourage all of you to take time over the next few days to celebrate your graduation, this singular accomplishment of your lives, by accounting — by telling stories to those who have helped you, held you up, fed you, wiped your tears, paid your bills. Share your recollections

Mascaras, Trenzas, y Grenas: Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories with Legal Discourse

This article uses Critical Race Theory methodologies, such as autobiographical narratives, and analytical approaches, such as critical pedagogy. Using personal narrative, this Article examines the various masks ( mascaras ) used to control how people respond to us and the important role such masks play in the subordination of Outsiders. The first part of the Article tells stories; the second part of the Article unbraids the stories to reveal an imbedded message: that Outsider storytelling is a discursive technique for resisting cultural and linguistic domination through personal and collective redefinition. The Article explores how transculturation creates new options for expression, personal identity, cultural authenticity and pedagogical innovation. This Article has as its characteristic motif the braiding together of the personal with the academic voice, legal scholarship with scholarship from other disciplines, narrative with expository prose and poetry, and English with Spanish. Though untidy ( grenas ), these linguistic and conceptual braids ( trenzas ) challenge conventional paradigms within the legal academy and subvert the dominant discourse

Uniendo Comunidades by Learning Lessons and Mobilizing for Change

Building community, that is, sustaining our connections to family and our ancestry is often hampered by going to law school. Law schools are highly adept at assimilating you into a profession and a worldview that can be at odds with who you were and how you saw the world before you began law school. Unfortunately, in order to fit in, it can seem advantageous to forget tus ralces, your roots. I began by talking about unigndo comunidades as a progressive objective and have been talking about the second part of your conference theme, learning lessons and mobilizing for change, as methods to achieve the objective. I am making a plea that you work more closely with us in LatCrit to create an alliance between progressive law students and law professors that will advance both of our agendas

Silence and Silencing: Their Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in Cultural Expression, Pedagogy and Legal Discourse

This article uses Critical Race Theory and LatCrit Theory in its analysis, methodologies, and purpose. I seek to disrupt silences around race and to provide the knowledge and skills for effective work on racial equity and justice. Language and voice have been subjects of great interest to scholars working in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Latina/o Critical Legal Theory. Silence, a counterpart of voice, has not, however, been well theorized. This Article is an invitation to attend to silence and silencing. The first part of the Article argues that one\u27s use of silence is an aspect of communication that, like accents, is related to one\u27s culture and may correlate with one\u27s racial identity. The second part of the Article posits that silence can be a force that disrupts the dominant discourse within the law school classroom, creating I.earning spaces where deeper dialogue from different points of view can occur. The third part of the Article focuses on the silencing of racial issues within legal discourse and public policy debates, a silencing that is a mechanism for racial control and hegemony. The Article uses the work and imagery of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic, to analyze how silence can have centering and de-centering linguistic force, offering performative and communicative choices that affect racial identities

A Brief History of Chicana/o School Segregation: One Rationale for Affirmative Action

This article uses Critical Race Theory methodologies, such as autobiographical narratives, and analytical approaches, such as revising the history of the civil rights struggle, especially as it applies to the Chicano-Latino communities. This paper represents a student-faculty collaboration in that the students organized the conference at which some of this analysis was first proposed. This was the conference at which now Justice Sonia Sotomayor made her now iconic comments about being a wise Latina. People can\u27t get to be judges without first going to law school, and Latinas/as can\u27t get to law school, at least in significant numbers, without affirmative action. With very few exceptions, the roomful of judges, law professors, lawyers and law students we saw over the past two days did not get to be where they are without affirmative action. When we fight for affirmative action, we fight for access to the legal profession; we fight to be public policymakers. Thus, fighting for affirmative action is a righteous struggle. It is about the well-being of our communities. It is about having a place at the table. It is about self-determination. It is about justice -- social justice, distributive justice and substantive justice. Affirmative action is the vortex of the civil rights struggle for this generation. I applaud your efforts and your struggles. I applaud you for organizing this conference on affirmative action. I would like to review and reclaim some of the struggles and the victories the Chicano/a communities have experienced in challenging segregated schools in the Southwest. I want to put to rest the idea that we Chicanas/os have no claim upon desegregation as a public policy to remove the vestiges of the de jure and de facto discriminatory policies and practices of the past. Finally, I want to excavate the legal history that demonstrates that the Chicana/o communities played a central role in dismantling the legal architecture that supported the separate and unequal school systems throughout the Southwest