Guinier and Sturm, as law professors at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, facilitated an experimental student-run seminar, “Critical Perspectives on the Law: Issues of Race and Gender,” in response to the absence of explicit engagement with race, gender and critical theory within the curriculum. Over a seven-year period, we developed a set of operating principles to experiment with the pedagogy. Our role was to push students to challenge the adequacy of established categories of race and gender, issues of professionalism and the conventions of legal analysis, and to create occasions for critical thinking and problem-solving.

We realized that we had developed a pedagogy that focused on three goals:

	motivating students to come to terms with their own moral agency,
	developing a space where different people can participate in addressing controversial and potentially polarizing issues, and
	challenging students to connect what they are learning in the classroom to their professional roles and their pursuit of social justice.

Both Guinier and Sturm have experimented with the operating principles in other law school settings including a civil procedure class at Columbia of more than 100 students, an upper level employment discrimination class of 40-60 students, and a required professional responsibility class of 50 students at Harvard Law School.