Re-Imagining Lawyering: Bringing Abolition Into the 1L Curriculum

Abstract

(Excerpt) This year, my 1L students began law school the same week that police shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake. As they learned criminal law in the Fall, they also learned that a grand jury had failed to indict the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor. And this Spring, they began studying for their final exams just as Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd and as police shot and killed 15-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. They entered the legal profession the same year that millions took to the streets, demanding a reckoning with the racist hierarchies underpinning this country’s legal system – a reckoning that, for many, requires the abolition of the police and the criminal legal system as it exists now. My students, like students around the country, grappled with what abolition might look like and what it might mean to be a lawyer working within a legal system reflects and entrenches existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Yet even as students struggled with these weighty questions, they remained largely unaddressed in the standard 1L curriculum