Introduction

This course developed out of Sturm’s work first as a plaintiff’s employment discrimination lawyer and then as a scholar using field research to develop innovative approaches to workplace equity. Sturm's background prompted questions about the adequacy of conventional approaches, which rely unduly on courts to develop and enforce universal rules for complex problems. It also led her to experiment with problem-oriented teaching and learning, and to collaborate with practitioners in developing and running the class.

 

Goals

The course uses interdisciplinary and inter-professional approaches to workplace equity issues. These broader perspectives more accurately reflect the considerations lawyers face in addressing workplace issues. They also expand students' conception of law and lawyering to take account of informal and organizational roles. The course also challenges the “lone ranger” image that sometimes emerges from the traditional Socratic classroom, and introduces the importance of collaboration across disciplines, positions, and identities.

Getting Started

Sturm created and co-taught the class with a clinical faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Alan Lerner. The faculty also had the assistance of a former practicing lawyer who was making a transition into teaching. This lawyer worked as a teaching fellow to help assemble materials, construct scenarios and role plays, and facilitate smaller group sessions.

[For another description, click here to download Alan Lerner, Law & Lawyering in the Workplace: Building Better Lawyers by Teaching Students to Exercise Critical Judgment as Creative Problem Solvers, 32 Akron l. Rev. 197 (1999)] [download as PDF]

The class was offered as an elective to 30 students during the second semester of their first year of law school. By the second semester, many students had already been socialized to adopt uncritically a pure litigation-oriented, adversarial model of lawyering. Through interdisciplinary readings, simulations, role plays, and interactions with practitioners, the course disrupted the frameworks students had passively internalized and stimulated students to rethink the lawyer’s role in addressing workplace equity problems.

Classroom Methods

The course focused its inquiry around two specific workplace contexts (a police department and a law firm), positioned students in varying roles within those contexts, (in house counsel, partner, police chief, union representative, community member, black employee affinity group etc), and pushed participants to think critically about the role of law and lawyers from the perspective of those different roles, values, and contexts. We developed interdisciplinary materials to give students a sense of the political, organizational, and cultural dynamics of those contexts. Students then read assigned legal cases with new understanding. Role plays, simulations, and discussions called upon students to interact at different decision points and to employ a range of skills, from traditional advocacy to mediation to institutional design to public persuasion. Academics from other disciplines and practitioners participated in the class, often enacting their real-world roles in the class room or critically commenting upon students’ role plays.

See resource page for course syllabus, procedures, and sample lesson plans.

 

Writing Assignments And Evaluation

The course tailored the writing assignments and assessment process to its goals. Students wrote newspaper editorials, participating in selecting in house counsel for a police department, designed a sexual harassment policy, grievance procedure, and organizational change process for a law firm, conducted a mediation, and participated in redesigning a selection and recruitment process for a police department faced with both a challenge by white officers to its affirmative action policy and a challenge by black applicants to its selection criteria. Because of the variety and intensity of interaction with students, faculty got to know them and their writing quite well. This provided faculty with considerable information upon which to base an evaluation of class participation. After faculty brought in a creative expert on constructing evaluation processes, they redesigned their own structured and shared assessment of participation. They identified and applied common criteria independently and then collectively to take account of their disagreements and potential biases.

When It Worked

Students seemed literally to expand their professional and analytical horizons. The interdisciplinary, theory/practice integration, when it “took”, opened them up to ask really interesting questions, to think dynamically about legal problems, and to take seriously the prospect of developing legal roles that could address underlying problems. This experience provided a foundation for rethinking approaches to teaching Civil Procedure, as well as to developing a new field research seminar at Columbia.