 Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us this afternoon for what will hopefully be a great conversation and great celebration of the release of this incredible book. My name is Ralph Tavares, and I serve as the director of diversity and outreach at Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island. And on behalf of Roger Williams Law and CUNY Law, we want to welcome you to this event celebrating again the release of integrating doctrine and diversity. Before we begin, I want to take a moment to reflect on the lands on which we reside. We are coming from many places physically and remotely and we want to acknowledge the ancestral homelands and traditional territories of indigenous and native peoples who have been here since time immemorial and to recognize that we must continue to build our solidarity and kinship with native peoples across the Americas and across the globe. Roger Williams University School of Law is located here in Bristol, Rhode Island. And so we acknowledge and honor the Narragansett and Poconocha people and Somes, the original name of the land that our campus resides on. We also acknowledge that this country would not exist if it wasn't for the free enslaved labor of black people. As we recognize that the town of Bristol and the very land our campus resides on has benefited significantly from the slave trade from enslaved folks from America, from Africa. The economy of New England, Rhode Island and more specifically, Bristol was built from wealth generated through the triangle trade of human lives. During this time of national reckoning with our history of slavery and disparate treatment of black people, we honored the legacy of the African diaspora and the black lives knowledge and skills stolen due to violence and white supremacy. While the movement for justice and liberation is building and we are witnessing the power of the people, many are still being met with violence and even being killed. As upholders of justice in our capacity as legal educators, our hope is to become agents of change for members of our society who have been met with violence, physical, mental, emotional through our privilege. And as legal educators, we believe that our students will soon be practitioners of law, can be and already are agents of change as well. So welcome everybody and thank you for allowing me the time to do that land and labor acknowledgement. At this time, I wanna welcome to the screen Gregory Bowman, Dean of Roger Williams University School of Law. Greg Bowman will share some opening remarks to kick off this event. Is Greg there? Greg is not there. Give me one quick second. Greg is on his way. Good afternoon, everyone. We're gonna contribute that to user error as I always tell people when something goes wrong, blame the Dean and so here I am. I'm very glad to be here and Ralph, thank you for opening us up. It's great to see everyone and it's very exciting to celebrate this launch. I wanna congratulate all of the editors, co-authors and in particular, my colleagues, Nicole Dushlesky and Suzanne Harrington Steppen. And we're really excited about this and I also wanna thank Keny Walsh Dean, Eduardo Capilong for his participation today and for support. So this is gonna be exciting. This subject and this book tie in very closely, directly to something that we value greatly at RWU Law. We have actually established a required course in Race and the Foundations of the American Law. And we have, we piloted it and Nicole was one of the teachers in that inaugural course and it will now be required beginning this year for all students who come to the Roger Williams University School of Law. So the idea of having that and to try to integrate diversity and teaching on diversity and inclusion into our curriculum, into doctrinal and to our doctrine is really, really very, very important. So once again, thank you. Apologies for the technical difficulties and I really look forward to today's event. Ralph, turn back over to you. Thank you. Thanks, Bryce. Thanks. Thankfully our offices are not too far away. Now I would like to invite to speak and share remarks, the Dean, the Interim Dean at CUNY Law, Edward Eduardo Capilong. And we would love for you to come on screen and offer your welcome and remarks. Yes, greetings. I'm hoping that folks can hear me. Yes, Eduardo. Yeah. Oh, good. I don't quite see myself and so I'm sorry about that. Well, Dean Bowman, Mr. Tavares, thank you very much for allowing me to welcome everyone here on behalf of our community at the CUNY School of Law. And thank you to everyone at the Roger Williams School of Law where I believe this idea of the book was born. Thanks also to my CUNY Law colleague, Raquel Gabriel. And of course to her co-editors, professors, Dyslovsky. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Harrington Steppen and Tong and Ms. Russell of the Ninth Circuit Library. So welcome everyone on behalf of the City University of New York School of Law. Thanks for our critical race colleagues. We all know for decades now that race and racism has always been a part of the American law and legal system. And so it's a legally and socially constructed reality and racial capitalism is a reality for all of us. So race and racism are integral right to the teaching of legal doctrine, which is why, as we know, the guardians of an apologist for the status score are so scared of critical race theory as we're seeing the attacks on the teaching of it are right now. And lately there's been an emergence of a movement to change the sacred cows of foundational legal instruction. As Dean on what she will exed in her preparatory remarks on the book, at the Boston University Conference a couple of years ago was a conversation that continued how we change how we teach property, contracts, criminal law, civil procedure, constitutional law, torts, right? To acknowledge the fact that these are all founded and to the present are permeated by race and racism. So Johnson versus McIntosh with respect to law and property and the theft of indigenous land as Mr. Tabaresa. So thankfully acknowledged and the law of contracts, of course, based on slavery, criminal laws about the social control of former slaves and so on. And so what I'm most thankful about and excited about in this book is it shows us how we teach race and racism and diversity and equity and inclusion in our courses in particular in the first year. It's a how-to book as the authors emphasize and I've not been able to read all of it but I'm excited to finish it. And it's great that you can jump here and there and back and forth to look at how we actually teach better race and racism not as an appendage, right? To the teaching of doctrine, but rather a central to the way that we teach legal doctrine. So also on behalf of my co-authors and thank you, Professor Gabriel for allowing us to contribute a short piece here. On behalf of my co-authors Andrew King-Rees and Monty Mills at the University of Montana, we appreciate being allowed to contribute a short piece here and I'm really excited to finish the book and get back into teaching because I can't wait to use all of these materials. So thank you very much. Thank you, Dean, for your remarks. And now I will turn this program over to the very, very capable hands of our librarian and author, one of the authors of this incredible book, Nicole Dyshlefsky, a great colleague and somebody who has been at the center of many of these conversations at our law school. Thank you so much and Nicole, congratulations. Thank you so much. It wouldn't be an online party unless we had a few tech flaws, but now we're in the groove. Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. It is absolutely terrifying for us to be here. Many of us are librarians and being out in front of the camera talking about something we wrote is pretty terrifying. In 2017, Roger Williams Law School started a diversity strategic planning committee and I was chosen to serve on the committee as a representative of the staff. And we were designing a diversity strategic plan for our law school, the first of its kind in the school's history. And in the year long discussion about where we were and who we were and where we were going and who we wanted to be, the committee, which included many brave student voices, talked about the need for conversations about race and gender and class and religion and sexual orientation and disability and difference to be happening in the classroom, not just adjacent to it. Students, particularly students of color did not feel seen in the law school classroom. In discussing this with faculty within our institution and then beyond our institution, I heard from faculty that, some faculty that committing to diversifying the curriculum in law school would be difficult for a number of reasons, including the reason that some faculty do not feel like there is enough institutional support or training or education for doing the work well. And so I kind of thought about that. And I thought either that is true or it's not true and that's an excuse, but I didn't really know. So I did what librarians do, which is I went back to my office and I researched everything. And it turns out that it was true that there were not abundant resources. And the resources that were available were not organized in a way which was easy to use and they were inconsistent across the curriculum. And that's when I thought, wow, like this is it. This is the thing I can do. I'm in these like year long discussion, like here's it as a staff member, as a librarian, this is the thing that I can do. I can contribute, I can bring this together. I can work to create a resource written for faculty by faculty. So I organized a team of superhero librarians and a Susie. And this thing went from this idea I had to a book. And the book is now in print and it contains contributions from something like 40 authors from across the country. And wow, strangers email me about it and it seems crazy. But today is the day that we are celebrating this book and we are celebrating these editors and we are celebrating these authors who do this work and have shared their wisdom and their talent and their time to create something that can help all of us at all institutions engage with moving our law schools forward on integrating diversity issues in the doctrinal classroom. I am so grateful for the work of my fellow co-editors, the professors and librarians who contributed to the book, our libraries, our law schools, our librarians who supported this work. And finally, let's not forget our family and friends and colleagues who held our hands through this long process which also happened in the middle of a pandemic and was sort of our first bumpy time figuring this out. So now that you haven't met me, let me introduce the rest of the team. The links to the bios can be found in the Q&A section. So first I wanna introduce Suzy Harrington-Steppen who is the Associate Director of Pro Bono Programs and the Director of the Summer Public Interest Externship Program at RW Law. You met briefly, I'm Rebeccalle J. Gabriel, Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law. There's Anna Russell, US Court Librarian Managing the Alaska Library Branch. Genevieve B. Tung, the Associate Director for Educational Programs at the Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania Cary Law School. That is the editorial team. And the authors and contributors that we have today is Clinitra Nadel, Head of Professional Development and Research Services Librarian at the Allen Queener Massey Law Library at Vanderbilt University, Jeremiah Ho, Associate Professor at UMass Law, and Huang Pham, Research and Policy Fellow for the Stanford Center for Racial Justice at Stanford Law. So I am gonna begin by talking to the editors and I'm gonna start with Suzy. Can you talk a little bit about yourself and your contribution to the work? How did you get involved and what was your role here? Thanks, Nicole. And thank you all for joining us today. This is really exciting. This has really been a labor of love and it's exciting to be together to celebrate it and to hear from some of the amazing contributors to the book. So I'll be quick as Nicole said I'm the Associate Director of Pro Bono Programs at Roger Williams. I oversee our mandatory pro bono program. I also directly supervise law students in the community and I work with a number of community partners and I also teach our externship program. I'm also a very proud alum of CUNY Law, go CUNY. So issues of diversity and inclusion and equity have always been central to my work and to my teaching. Students often arrive to me in the classroom and through my community legal work with no experience talking about diversity issues in a classroom setting. So no structured opportunities to reflect on their personal identities, their professional identities and very little classroom experience intentionally devoted to critical analysis of law and our legal systems and how they perpetuate inequities. I know my observations and experiences are shared by many of you on the call today. A student's third year of law school in a clinical program or an upper level elective should not be the first time that that student has been asked to critically engage in conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion. This has to be a central part of legal education starting from the very first day they walk into our law schools, not an extra and add on topic as several people have already mentioned today. So when Nicole came to me with, I mean, Nicole has a lot of great ideas but this one was so straightforward. She's like, we've got to create this book that's a response to folks who say like, where do I start or I need new ideas? Let's put this all in one place and make it really practical, something that's really readable. When Nicole asks, you generally just say yes and then you figure out later what it's going to involve. So it's been really an incredible experience for me to be able to work on this book and it's one small way that I've been able to push the conversation forward on behalf of the students here at Roger Williams and students all across the country who deserve a better curriculum. So thanks, Nicole. Thanks for having us all today. All right, Anna, same question. Can you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your relationship with the book? Thank you, Nicole. My name is Anna Russell. I'm with the Knight Circuit Library team and I manage the Alaska branch. I've known Nicole now for many years and I will reiterate what Suzanne said and when Nicole asks you for something for help you generally say yes. Her ideas are phenomenal and thinking back to what you said, Nicole, about talking about these issues in 2017 and here we are in 2021 and it seems like a no-brainer but I feel like back then it was very visionary. I recall having conversations with you about, okay, how do you mean to make this a how-to practical guide? And I'm just, I'm so honored and thankful to have been a part of this really neat editorial team and I'm trying to share my contributions and I'm very excited now to push the ball forward and to work with further conversations with attorneys and legal professionals and the court system and how exciting this sort of modern approach to education and the law and bringing in the realm of diversity, equity, inclusion when you're talking about the reasonable person is just, it's so apropos right now and it's very exciting but my contributions have been really a learning and when the rest of the editorial team understood that Anna got it then they knew that it was gonna be, it was gonna make sense to the wider public. So thank you all and I'm very excited to talk more and hear more from everybody. Thanks, Anna. Genevieve, do you wanna introduce yourself and talk about your relationship with the book? Very briefly, my name is Genevieve Tong. Again, I'm at the University of Pennsylvania Cary School of Law's Biddle Law Library and a longtime friend and collaborator with Nicole. We've written some other projects together and when she produced this idea to me, I wanted to be a part of the group but also I have a selfish interest as someone who was trying to expand my skills as a instructor in the law school and to learn from or request to learn from so many incredible educators who are working in the academy. I feel like there's a great desire, only partially tapped to learn from what our broader educational cohort has to tell us. So I was very excited to selfishly get first access to these thoughts and examples and first person narratives of what it's like. So I was very grateful to play a small role mostly as a, did a lot of copy editing and but I feel like we had a great team that each brought unique strengths. So it's, and I was also very excited to work on a project that involved such a big bibliographic component where we had a bibliography created one by one of our law library colleagues for every single chapter so that we could really bring a hive mind to it and learn from the past because even though this resource is unique and does a great job of bringing together and synthesizing information, there is a really rich tradition that we draw upon and that many of our contributors draw upon. So thanks to everyone for being here. It's great to have a chance to see so many of our authors here in the audience as well. Thanks, Genevieve. So as you can tell, Anna, Genevieve and Susie, I knew before this, but Raquel, I cold called. I called her one day and said, you don't know me, but you want to write a book with me. And she said, like, do I? So Raquel, do you want to introduce yourself and talk about the book? So thanks, Nicole. My name is Raquel Gabriel. I'm a professor of law and director of the Law Library at CUNY. I'm one of the co-editors, as she said, and I also contributed to the chapter on legal research, which I've taught at CUNY since my arrival in 2000. And yes, Nicole just called me out of the blue one day. And it sounded like something that actually could be helpful for teaching. And especially for those faculty, and I thought it'd be helpful for my faculty here at CUNY, who talk a lot about diversity and trying to integrate it into the curriculum. And I've written about diversity in the larger field of law librarianship over the years, but I wanted to start talking about more generally in the field of legal education, right? I think a lot of my role in the process was in a lot of ways to stand back and be in awe of all the people we were able to get to help us write this book as well as at the fantastic work my co-editors did. I think a lot of my role in the process was trying to make sure that we had faculty with as many diverse backgrounds as possible. I did a lot of bugging people here at CUNY like, well, who do you know? Or suggestions or talking out loud with the editors about who would be great people to reach out to? And then I also think that sometimes what my role was to like remind us all that we've got to let people talk about their experiences with their own voices because that was the value of the book really, to let folks talk about their experiences in teaching, how they would approach diversity and race issues in a way that would be approachable and easier to read and didn't have necessarily all of the very formal structures of say a law review article or a larger piece. So I'm glad I said yes that day and I've gotten to know this wonderful group of editors as well as our contributors and Nicole, back to you. All right, my next question is for Suzy. The book was written to be consumed in a particular way. Can you talk a little bit about how we intended the book to be read and used by faculty? Absolutely. So Nicole in the introduction to the book talks about this is sort of like a choose your own adventure style book. So we would hope that all of you will hopefully will purchase it if you haven't already used the book by first reading chapter one, which really applies to faculty, staff, anyone working with students. It really has incredible essays that touch on cross-curricular integration of diversity inclusion with an eye towards the first year. So from there, we think that each of the chapters represents a doctrinal subject that one else are introduced to. So if you teach property or contracts, obviously you go right to the chapter in your area of expertise. And as Genevieve mentioned, each of the chapters includes an annotated bibliography. So really we want this book to be something that's really practical and points you in the direction to additional resources. And God knows we could write thousands and thousands of pages, there's incredible resources, but it's a starting place. And I also just urge folks to read essays outside of their subject area, because there's just incredible ideas in terms of how to create an inclusive classroom. And as Nicole just mentioned, just amazing reflections on what it means to be a teacher and to be in that position. So I would urge folks to go beyond the doctrinal areas. And then the last thing I wanna mention, and actually someone made a comment in the Q&A already is how do we actually use this? And one way we've been using at Roger Williams is we have an informal teaching group, we call it the Friday group, of folks who want to do better in terms of our teaching and including diversity, inclusion and equity issues into all of our teaching. We've chosen a few essays, we all read them, and then we talk about them. And there's differing opinions, but it's a really beautiful way to sort of dig into the book. And also at our institution, it's been an opportunity to create really trusting relationships with other colleagues teaching so that when you do make mistakes, which you will, because when you do things differently, you have to take risks. You have a supportive group of colleagues who are willing to talk about what had happened or what you're planning to do in the classroom. So that's one way to use the book is grab an article or grab an essay and grab some colleagues and friends and start talking about this stuff. Thanks, Susie. Genevieve, can you talk a little bit about the creation process of the book? How was it working with so many editors and then so many contributors from across the country? I will say if you look at the table of contents of the book, every name listed is a fantastic person to work with on a, if you're looking for contributors in future projects, we were extremely fortunate to have an incredible group of people, both who came to us in response to our initial proposals in the spring and summer of 2019, as well as folks that we reached out to because we knew they had expertise in a certain subject. Not all subjects in the 1L curriculum were equally easy to populate and we wanted to represent everything with as much force as we could. But we were tremendously fortunate to just work with so many fantastic people who were able to roll with the unprecedented difficulties of the past 18 months. In part, we had already fleshed out a substantial amount of the book before the shutdowns of March of last year and I certainly had some dark moments where I was concerned about the future but we were tremendously lucky to have our contributors maintain a commitment to the work and help us stay on track. We actually didn't even lose any time with our publisher. So I'm just personally incredibly grateful to each of them. I think the largest issue we ran into was the conditions of the pandemic as we know only further exposed grievous inequities in our society that many of us wanted to respond to in real time, which was challenging as we were trying to get it to fruition. We kept running up against the fact that there are additional major injustices in the world that need to be included. The same goes for the protests nationwide and worldwide that we all saw last June in response to the murder of George Floyd. It was a difficult, I think, to throw the needle between making the work as responsive as possible to the ongoing issues that are confronting our students that come up in our teaching and trying to put it in folks' hands as soon as possible. So, but we were generally just, it was just great. And once we're all working on Zoom adeptly, that was a fantastic way to collaborate with our colleagues across the country, which is great because our work represents of the, I think, the 40-something contributors we've got were all over the nation. So it's a great time to be collaborating in the year 2021, I guess. Thanks, Nicole. All right, Anna. So one of my favorite parts of the book and really this whole experience is that it centers law librarians. So law librarians is editors and authors and instructors and is a meaningful part of law school communities. Can you tell me a little bit why you think law librarians are the perfect group of people to create this book? Thanks, Nicole. So I think this is another example of how forward-thinking Nicole is. I'm not sure there could have been a better group to have been the editors for this type of practical work because kind of thinking about it in hindsight, the more of a subject matter expert you are, the more narrow, specific you're gonna inevitably become, you may even become more regionally focused. And that wouldn't have really worked very well for the broad scope, the encompassing nature of this book that we really wanted to bring to it. Genevieve spoke about how many areas of the country we were able to gather author contributors. And it was just so neat to see as a law librarian, I mean, all of us, we love to communicate and collaborate and contribute. And I think that that just made this work in spades. And Suzanne was also our nominated librarian because she totally did the same sort of thing about communicating and working with diverse groups because this book wouldn't have happened if you had a legal specialty that was your focus. You really needed it to be broad. You needed to look at integrating all types of diversity. And that's really the librarian strength and the networks that we all had, just we would come together in a meeting and we would be like, oh, you know so-and-so and oh, you were able to talk to the individual in that area. That's really neat. It worked out really well. And I was, I shouldn't have been, I shouldn't have been impressed, but I was very impressed by what we were able to bring together as librarians and our networks. Thanks, Anna, Raquel. The style of the book, while not uniform, is overwhelmingly focused on the practical. Can you talk a little bit about why we chose to focus on practical works and not something more theoretical? I mean, I think it goes back to what part of our original intent was to have something that teachers in the first year curriculum could absorb fairly quickly in their areas and see examples of how to integrate it into their classes. And to also be helpful to teachers who are both new in the classroom as well as those of us who might have more experience. There's no shortage of legal scholarship regarding the pedagogy of legal education. But in terms of integrating diversity, I hope that more is being written as we speak by a lot of talented faculty members across the country and that we're gonna see those longer theoretical pieces coming out soon and in the, and in future years, much like the same way we've seen clinical education and our clinical colleagues put out pieces about cultural competency, right? But the contributions that we have in the book illustrating how to integrate races, issues of race and diversity on a practical level balanced against some of what I was calling the reflection pieces, summaries of the experiences over the years from other faculty members, right? Those two things complemented by the curated bibliographies from the law librarians. All of that together, I think creates a book that's very accessible to teachers who are curious about how to start the process of addressing race and diversity issues in their classes. By seeing what others have done in their area, I hope it can spark some, and I thought, and I think we were all hoping it would spark some further thought about how to do it themselves and encourage them to do so with careful thought and reflection and realize that they could do it. And while you couldn't, we didn't think that all teachers would be able to obviously integrate everything they see in the same way. We're hoping that folks can read a chapter, figure out what would work for you and your law school's culture and adapt it to what your comfort level is for teaching, but it's really to encourage you that this is not impossible, that we're giving you a blueprint, that we're giving you an example of talented colleagues from across the country and that you can sort of make it your own or do as like Suzy was saying, have discussions amongst your own faculty or with others in your institution to kind of move the ball forward. All right, thank you. So we're gonna shift our focus a little bit. This was one of the best writing experiences of my career and at the very core of it, it just worked. As a team, we just worked really well together. And the Law Librarian Editors and Suzy provided blue booking and editorial support. We conceived of the structure and organized the information, but the star of the show in our opinion are the content providers, the professors and librarians who wrote the chapters that made it useful and engaging. So today we have three of the authors with us to talk about the contributions to the books. I am going to start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah, you were one of the first professors we reached out to directly. We had to ask one of your law librarians, Jessica Almeida to contribute a bibliography for the book. And she suggested you might be someone who would be interested in writing on this topic. Your approach to contracts really excited us. It's been suggested that contracts is not an appropriate place to teach issues of race, gender class, gender identity, sexual orientation and religion. That these issues don't naturally surface in discussions or don't fit neatly into the area of law where professors are struggling to fit so much content in in so little time. Can you just talk a little bit about yourself and your chapter and based on your experiences and your identity and your pedagogy, how do you respond to professors who say it just doesn't fit? Thank you for having me, Nicole. And thanks for allowing me to share my work alongside with so many great colleagues. I'm very proud of this project. I'm very excited to actually read up all the other articles there in this particular volume. I would respond to your question by asking, posing the other questions, which is don't we all live in a pluralistic society where we are all very different, right? On this particular call here, the Zoom session here, a lot of us don't look the same, right? But we all use the same contracting systems to write the story of our lives. So to make decisions about employment and where we live and what we eat and how we define ourselves in our tastes through contracts, right? So if so, then let's talk about how contracts may hold some people back in terms of their bargaining power or in also at the same time letting others have an advantage. I have a very good example from just yesterday with my office hours. I had a student who is openly trans and had mentioned to me how different his experiences are in buying a car, which he did recently in a dealership, versus the experience he had buying a car before his transition. And the issue, and I think that came through was, well, how is that difference not implicated by contracts and how we behave through our system of contracting. So we have to make time to discuss these issues in contracts courses. And in contracts, I would say is the perfect place to explore these issues regarding, you know, race and gender and class and sexuality. Can you talk a little bit about what your chapter is about? Sure. So in segwaying from there, it's not hard. In talking about teaching in first years, I think to introduce these concepts of race, class and gender and hegemony into a contrast course, which typically and traditionally might focus on just starting the course from a freedom of contracting perspective, which is a way to sometimes sanitize most of the issues of diversity into just an afterthought. I start with the concept of objectivity in contract law. How do we read all of the gestures that occur within the negotiation process, the breach process, how do we calculate damages in terms of objectivity, which is a basic rule in contracts and how that objectivity really marginalizes, perspectives are in the way we teach objectivity, marginalizes different perspectives and different points of view when it comes to contracting. And so I pick several different seminal cases that most often are taught in the first year contracts course. And I sort of undo them in a way to talk about how they all can be sanitized in some ways to not talk about diversity, but then how do we unpack those cases and teach them in order to make students aware that all of our differences are underneath the surface of these rules that we hold to be paramount. So it's not as if you're injecting these issues in, it's if they were always there, they were always lurking and you're just gonna talk about them. Right, one thing that struck me very deeply as a law student in my first year of law school was let's talk about the reasonable person, right? Objectivity is the basis for that idea. And well, who is the reasonable person, right? And in contracts, we look at the objective theory of contracting, how do we read an offer and if something is purportedly going to be an offer through a reasonableness lens? And who controls that? Who starts the conversation about reasonableness and what does that actually mean? And what happens if marginalized voices are not heard in that particular type of discussion? And that's something I took away from very viscerally from my first year of experience in law school and I thought that when I became a law professor that something I definitely wanted to explore and over time, I think I've created lessons here and there throughout the course where we stop and we question that. In fact, one of the cases that I talk about in the chapter that I wrote, I actually just taught recently two weeks ago when we started a class and it was about how to read a certain type of dialogue to determine whether or not that dialogue purports to be an offer. And I actually had a student in advance of what I was gonna get to say, well, what if the person that said this was of a nationality that was different from where most of the people in that community would be? So how would objectivity be affected by that? And it led into a semi-conversation about implicit bias. Our biases are often going to confirm sort of what we do and affirm what our practices are, but what if you have somebody who is not from the area and may not read the gestures or their communications similarly? So how do we become aware of that? So that we don't misconstrue and we also don't marginalize. Thank you. Clinitra, as a frequent speaker and leader in law librarianship on the issue of diversity, you were another author we contacted almost immediately after signing our contract. One of the reasons that this project got started was because there were no good places professors could turn to define content in their areas on how to integrate diversity into their doctrinal classes. But you were tasked with sort of identifying that content. Can you talk a little bit about your process of identifying resources and what you learned from this? Sure. So first, let me say thank you for including me in the project. I was really excited about being a part of it. One of the things for me that was exciting about writing the annotated bibliography on property is that property is one of those topics that really lends itself to a frank discussion of race and ethnicity and other types of diversity. And the conflicts related to that and how the courts resolve those conflicts. So Shelley versus Kramer, the Macintosh case, so even the Amistad, this idea of what is property, who has it and do you even own yourself? And so because those aspects were so prevalent in a lot of the property law materials, I was really excited. I also think about the fact that property law cases are probably one of the first places that students start to parse out those issues once they get to law school, when they start looking at the cases and how the outcomes of those cases and whether or not that's fair and whether does the law necessarily equate to fairness? So that's, to me, that was one of the great parts about focusing on those works. When I was thinking about what works to include and there were a lot to sort through, so I feel like it could have been, the entity of the law for you could have been much longer than it was, but when I thought about what to include, one of my thoughts was I wanted to try to focus or at least find as much as possible from authors who had written extensively on the intersection between property and diversity, writ large. And so Alfred Brophy, you know, Cheryl Harris, the faculty members that you have read about and have read their works that really talk about these issues in interesting ways. The other thing that for me was that was important was to find works that would sort of guide and handhold in terms of explaining to professors how to do this, those practical steps of doing this as opposed to just the esoteric, this is something that should be done. Because I think at the heart of it, it really needs to be, as you all mentioned earlier, something that's practical and helpful how to resource for incorporating diversity into the doctrine. And also I really was interested in different ideas. So a lot of the works related to the property classes had to do with incorporating narratives, incorporating different readings with reading some of the seminal cases to give alternative perspectives on property. And so I thought that a lot of the authors had really unique and creative ideas about how to make the points to the students and how to incorporate these issues. And so I really wanted to focus on the works that did that as well. So in doing all this, I really learned that there are a lot of different ways that you can incorporate diversity into any class, but specifically into a property law class. I think it's more a matter of what your comfort level is and how you move to the next step in changing how you teach. I think that's really important to think about, which is if you're already at a high level where you're doing things, there are resources for you. But it's not one size fits all, and you might be just starting out on the journey of trying to diversify or integrate some of this content or provide more nuance before you hadn't. And so don't feel like because you haven't done it or you're not doing it perfectly or you're not doing it at the most robust level possible that there isn't room for growth. And so I think that that's one of the reasons I really like the bibliography is that here's an array of resources that can hit you at different levels and that can grow with you. One of the things that I thought was pretty interesting about doing the bibliography is I did think about what if there's a professor who has taught property every year for years? What if there's something in this article that gets them thinking about a case that they've taught frequently a little bit differently and realizing we can tease out these points in various ways? So I'm really glad that the work can speak to new faculty but also hopefully get some more established faculty thinking about the things that they teach all the time in a different way. Thanks, Clinitra. Wang, can you tell us a little bit about how you found out about our project or how you found us or more like how we found you and how you experienced this project as a student and as a student, how does being a student impact what you wrote, what is your chapter about? And if you could talk a little bit about how your identity but also your identity as a student informed your work. Yeah, I'll just first start off by saying as a student who worked on this project in a project full of law professors that definitely felt out of place, Nicole, you always reassured me that what I was writing needed to be heard so I'm really grateful to be a part of this and just grateful to be a part of a group with such brilliant minds on how we can improve legal education for students across the nation. I think I would be remiss if I didn't begin this story with Professor Miradayo who during my fall semester of my second year of law school encouraged me to write this paper. She was not just encouraging me to write this paper but she was like, you should also publish this paper. And as a first generation student, I think I was at the time just grateful that I survived the first year of law school. Publishing anything was not something I've never done before. Publishing a paper was, I didn't even know where to begin. So after she encouraged me to do that, I just kind of set it aside and was like, let me just try to finish law school and I'll figure this out later. My spring semester of my second year, I had Professor Brian Stocek who taught me constitutional law too. And Professor Stocek approached Conlaw too in a way where he actually integrated diversity conversations regularly into his class. And so one day I met with him after class and I just had a conversation with him around, how do we get more professors at our school to start doing what you're doing? Because you are clearly creating a space where students feel engaged, they feel like their stories are included and they feel validated and affirmed in who they are and discussing the cases that are helping us actually learn the law. And he had brought up this book that was getting written and edited called Integrating Doctorate in Diversity. He was like, check it out. There's a lot of great ideas in there. And so I Googled this book and upon Googling it, I came upon a site that was like, this is the book. This is what we're trying to do. We're putting all these papers together. If you have a paper or have an idea, feel free to reach out to us. And I'm pretty sure at that time, the submission deadline had already passed and this was just still up online somewhere. And I was just, had Professor Dao in my head saying you should just submit anyways. And so I emailed Susie and Nicole and shared my paper with them and here we are. But so that's kind of how I got, I had found out about this book, but my paper I think really started as like a student in the classroom who, and I'm sure many folks on this call may have had this experience when they're in law school, but I remember starting law school and being in surprisingly my contracts class and feeling like I didn't belong. Feeling like the language was foreign, how people talk was foreign, the issues or the ideas that were being discussed was foreign, everything was so different for me and that I didn't know who I was in this room. And I had previous, I spent six years teaching in South LA prior to going to law school. So I had already kind of developed an identity for myself, but it was almost like when you go to law school, you kind of have to hang up who you are, give away who you are and then become this new person. And who you are isn't really necessary allowed in the classroom. You're kind of supposed to hang up the coat of who you are at the doors and then go in and be indoctrinated into this legal profession. And so a lot of students would leave these classes and we would talk to each other about how, dang, like we wish we would have brought up this issue about race or gender that was clearly implicated in this place, but it never was disgusting class. And you didn't want to be that student that brought up the issue of race because then you'd be labeled that student that always brought up issues of race. And so students were frustrated. And I think at a couple other experiences I had that kind of led to me wanting to do something about it was I had a friend who was a black woman in a criminal law class. And when the professor started having a discussion around policing, she was really frustrated about how she got her experience where he raised in that conversation and literally left the class crying and went home. And it's those kind of experiences that students have with the very traumatic stories in the cases that we read that kind of prompted me to think, I know I'm just a student, but I should try to do something about this. And so it led me to like thinking about, well, if I wrote a paper about how to do this for professors, what would I say? And I really go back to another professor of mine who actually did include conversations diversity in the classroom. Her name is Professor Irene Zhou. She was my first year criminal law professor and she was the first person who actually allowed me to see myself in the curriculum that was taught in the classroom. And surprisingly, I did the best in her class out of any of the other classes I had in my first year of law school. And I think it's that approach to teaching that really allowed students like me, a first generation student who didn't identify with the legal academia, legal profession, that when I saw myself, I saw my personal experiences in the learning that I was doing, I was actually able to connect the dots with regards to the law and actually become successful in understanding how to apply the law. So then when I started writing this paper, I was like, how do I streamline what Professor Zhou does into like a process that any professor can pick up? And so that's kind of how I came up with this idea of the critical case brief. Thanks. I think what you said deserves some amplification. And it's something I've heard a lot and that really drives me forward. When I hear students say like, there isn't room for me in this classroom and I don't have an identity here and I'm asked to leave who I am behind. But that who you are, that amazing who you are got you here. And then you step into our doors and we're like, yeah, but that doesn't fit here. But I'm telling you it does. And so I just want everyone to hear that like, that is the way at least some of our students, many, most of our students feel. And like just at the very core of me, I'm like not okay with that. So when we first met you, it was this like really interesting moment in our process where I was like, oh my God, wait, we should have been including student voices the whole time. At so many of our institutions, students are demanding doctrinal professors teach issues in a critical way, acknowledge that race, gender, class, national origin, disability and identity impact and are impacted by the legal systems and doctrine in this country. They're asking or demanding that professors understand intersectionality, negotiate classroom discussions in a way which is less painful to minoritize or stigmatize students and to give a name to the whiteness and maleness pervading our classrooms. Why didn't we think to include students? And so I think like your chapter and you were sort of a revelation. Can you talk a little bit more about how you see like what advice you have for professors and how you see 1L professors and law schools using the case briefing method that you recommend in your chapter across the curriculum? Yeah, I think this is where I think I've mentioned in my paper. I leave it to the professor to use their expertise in teaching, to use their expertise in research to really utilize this method, how they see fit in introducing critical perspectives into their curriculum. I think a part of the book is really giving this vast array of resources for professors, right? Because we want the, we don't really want barriers to entry in introducing these perspectives for professors which I know research has found that many professors don't actually do this work because they're kind of, they're in this space of being fearful of mishandling a conversation with students in class, right? You don't want to be that professor who has a conversation about race and just completely fumbles it and actually does more harm than good. And so the idea behind my critical case brief is how do you create a low barrier of entry for professors who may be reluctant to integrate critical perspectives in the classroom so that they can actually have these meaningful conversations with students. And so the way that I see professors using it is, okay, you're gonna read my paper and then you'll see there's like this four-step approach, right? You look at your syllabus, find a few cases where you know there's some implications of race, gender or class and then do some research. Utilize the law librarians at your school because they are amazing. And you know, find some critical facts about this case that otherwise is not included in casebooks. And then with that article that you find or some other supplement, assign that to your students, have them read it. And then what they're gonna do is, as they're learning how to case brief, they're gonna add in a section for critical facts where facts that are typically not included in casebooks that actually get at the race, gender, class, sexuality of the people who are involved in these cases. And then using those facts, they're going to continue doing their case brief and then include a critical analysis based on those critical facts and using that same law that was applied by the court to analyze the case. And then their conclusion is kind of whatever the conclusion ends up being based on those new facts that they get or the facts that are not included in the casebook, so that they can actually have this robust conversation about well, how did the court decide this case in the way that they did and what other underlying factors may have changed the way that the court should have or could have decided this case. And so I really see them taking and adapting this method in the way that they see fit. I've made it such that it's literally like anybody can pick it up and any professor, new professor, professors who've been around for a long time can pick it up and use it. But I also wanna make sure that there's this point that they should trust their expertise. They should trust what they've done. They should trust their teaching expertise to know how they work with their students. But I think the most important thing for me is not just a critical case brief, but I also mentioned this in my paper that we have to build really safe environment to communities for our students to thrive and exist in. Not all my professors did this, right? And oftentimes it would be first day you jump in and straight up, it's like first case, right? And you go straight into the case and no one knows each other. Students don't know each other. The professors don't know the students. Professors barely knows the names, like they barely know their names of all the students until like the students on call, right? So how are we spending our time in the classroom actually creating that safe environment so that students can have this conversation? And I'm gonna go back to Professor Jill real quick because I think she did a really great job of this. One of the things that she did at the very beginning was she actually assigned students partners in our class and what we were expected to do was to go outside after class, before class and actually learn about each other. And then we would present about the other person to the entire class. And I think an activity like that allows you to not just build a relationship with your classmates but it builds trust such that when you start getting into these more different conversations about race and gender, you're more comfortable and you trust each other in talking about these things. So that's how you kind of create that environment where even if you fumble a conversation about race, the students are going to not respond by saying, dang, you messed up, you should never do that again. But they're gonna know that you've already created that environment where they can give you feedback and you can give them feedback about how we can improve as a class together. I think something that you said really reminded me of what Jeremiah said, which is when you were talking about the facts in the critical case brief method, you're not asking them to bring in facts from nowhere. You're just asking them to include the facts about gender or disability status or sexual orientation. So again, it's not this thing we need to inject. It's this thing that was there all along. We're just asking for awareness of it. Absolutely. All right, so I think, so this question is for Klinitra and Wang and Jeremiah. So part of this is a struggle. And the struggle is that some 1L professors and law schools generally are not integrating this material. So I guess my question is, what do you think is holding law professors back from integrating diversity content into the law school curriculum in a more holistic and robust way at the moment in time we're at with the students calling for it, where are we still stuck? And any of the three of you can start. Well, I think that fear, honestly, is one of the key factors that is stopping some professors from moving forward. And it's okay to be afraid. Some things are scary, especially if you haven't done them before. I can provide grace for people who are afraid. I cannot provide grace for people who are complacent. And so what I want to see from professors is moving past that fear and figuring out how in their particular class and their particular situation, they can make steps towards incorporating diversity more and more. And I think that over time, some of that fear will go away, but first there has to be that kind of honest discussion with self of why is it that I'm hesitant to do this and can I move past that? I would agree with that. And that often I think people don't know where to start. It's overwhelming to be aware of diversity and how do you say things and how do you phrase things? And so I always recommend that it's, first of all, it is about awareness and finding out exactly what the issues are and how to unpack them. How do that relate to your class and the units that you're going through and the doctrine that you're teaching? But also it's really about listening and slowing down. And it's okay to make mistakes as long as you apologize and move forward. Everyone will be making some sort of mistake here and there. It's about taking that risk and being vulnerable. I think students often find that in law school particularly, just in general, even beyond diversity issues is that there is this glass partition between us professors and then students. And I think that is a big hurdle in teaching in general. I think part of teaching and good teaching is to establish a relationship with your students that allows for content to be delivered in an effective way or allow for learning to take place in that particular environment. And part of it is okay to be vulnerable in that situation to say, well, there are these very difficult conversations to have in the doctrine that we're looking at. And if I make a mistake, I'm gonna apologize for own it and then move on. I think that to know that is actually very freeing. And I think often professors or colleagues are hesitant to venture into more difficult conversations because of that fear. But sometimes it's just about moving through that and having grace. So on one hand I think, yeah, like I know it's difficult. I know it's difficult because I do it in my classroom and it's terrifying. And sometimes I get it wrong and I feel terrible and then I feel more terrible. And I just promise that next time I'm going to do better. And so I think the fear is the real thing. On the other hand, I feel like law professors are some of the most masterful people at negotiating discussion that I've ever seen. And so the same talent that you would use, the talent or skill that you have at negotiating a very difficult conversation about something in property law is the same set of skills you would need to negotiate a difficult conversation about a diversity issue. And so the law professors have this in them already. I've seen it, it's amazing. And so why are we not using this for the greater good to integrate all this content? And so on one hand I'm like, yeah. On the other hand, I'm like, no, like I word you no points, like no, that's not it. So I was gonna bring up this point about the will, right? Do professors have the will to actually try to do this? I've seen professors at my school actually go through the process of thinking about how to do this and then trying to do it. And it takes a lot of work. And we know professors are busy, you're writing papers, you're teaching classes. And it actually, I do think it takes a concentrated effort to actually get at preparing properly to have these conversations in your classroom and actually taking the time to dig in. And so yeah, I guess it goes back to these ideas of do they have the will to do it? And then the other thing I was gonna bring up is I actually surveyed all the professors at my school to ask about how they do this in their classroom, whether they do it or if my critical crates speech would be something they'd be interested in using. And I think a lot of professors have deferring opinions about how to do this. And so some of them already do it, others don't do it at all. And for those that don't do it at all, they have opinions on why they don't do it. And at the end of the day, I think there's, Nicole, you talk about in your introduction this argument for academic freedom. And a lot of professors may make that argument where it's like, well, I don't necessarily have to do it because this is part of academic freedom. I could teach how I wanna teach in the classroom. So what do we do to create that environment at a school where all professors kind of sign onto it? Do you require and mandate professors integrate this into the curriculum? I don't think that's the right approach to go. Or do you kind of create some pressure, right? Where it's like, you know, there's like a group of professors who do observations. This is kind of another thing I wanted to bring up was how often do professors watch each other teach? How often do professors get feedback from folks who already do this in the classroom? I thought about Professor Joe and I was like, a lot of professors at my school could benefit from sitting in Professor Joe's classroom and watching her teach. But we don't, I mean, past the tenure process, how often do professors actually get that chance to watch each other teach? So maybe we need to reevaluate how, you know, the teaching and learning process works for professors. It's particularly post-tenure when they, at least to my knowledge, they don't tend to have that feedback loop as much as they did prior to tenure. I can kind of jump in there and maybe do a side response. And I think often that you're right that there, it is harder to harness a collective body of people who are gonna do the same thing or try to do something right by the students in the same way, right? So, and everybody's gonna bring to the table something different and that's expected. You're going to likely hit situations where somebody on the faculty may not wanna do exactly, you know, they've been doing something for a long time this particular way and they don't wanna integrate diversity or they may not feel like it is within their, they're put a local views to do that or whatnot. So that is something that is realistically going to happen in probably every institution that you see. One, I think way to think about it is, well, are there incentives, right, that are maybe externalized through the norms of that faculty body that says, well, you know, we care about our students, right? And we want them to be able to be effective lawyers. We want them to be empathetic people, you know, they want them to be able to be good citizens, right? And maybe part of awareness of a diversity needs to be in that conversation or perhaps it needs to be in a conversation in a big way, right? And so that I've seen been a very effective way of communicating with faculty members who may be reluctant and to start that conversation and know that it's not going to be something that you're gonna solve overnight, but it may be something that you, a conversation that you engender and you slowly and surely, you know, have over a period of several years in order to encourage faculty colleagues to do things like this and you're not necessarily ever gonna win them 100% over, but you may get them started on something and that itself is a good thing. But that's one of those reasons that this book, I think it's so important, Nicole, because for those professors who have an idea of what it is to incorporate diversity and it might be this high ideal, the book gives them avenues, right, to eventually start to get there. So that's one of the things that I think is so great about it is that there are ways to do it and here they are, we've given them to you. I think it's also, we should be mindful of asking people to do this in ways at least in the beginning that they can feel most comfortable. So maybe coming in and doing a lesson on Black Lives Matter isn't the most comfortable for a particular professor, but maybe starting with gender or starting with disability. And I think one of the things about having grace and showing grace to others is allowing people the opportunity to grow. And so maybe not every professor is doing exactly how I would do it or to the max amount that I would like, but I have to sort of be willing to grow with them and grow through this process. Sometimes I'm an inpatient person and anyone on the call who knows me knows I'm pretty impatient. And so I struggle with, but our students are getting hurt, but you're hurting my students, but you're hurting my students and the students are saying you're hurting me, but at the same time, like my truth has been people need to sort of be given the room to grow and feel their way through this and make mistakes and decide what's true to their teaching style and their subject matter. And that's sort of what we came to, which is this isn't a book to try to convince you that this is the right thing to do. This is the book that if you want to do it, here's some ways to do it. And there's no convincing because it's just not the fight we're fighting. And so my hope is, is that people can get something out of it. And in what direction that goes, I think it remains to be seen and I think that it's gonna be a bunch of different directions for a bunch of different people. But my hope is, is that we have contributed in some way to the ongoing conversation. So I'd like to invite the editors back for a final question, for anyone who wants to answer it. What is the kernel of truth that you wanna share from your contribution to the book or this process of writing the book? And anyone can jump in. I'll go first. Can folks hear me? Okay, as usual, I'll chat. For me, what was really interesting is the recognition that folks have been doing this work already, right? I think that at CUNY we've been trying to do it internally and with our own faculty for several years, but it was great to see the work that's being done at other schools, right? And that we're not, we have this particular type of book and tool, but for example, Professor Terry McMurdy-Chubb just released that book on strategies and techniques for integrating diversity, equity, inclusion into the core law curriculum, right? So that's another tool. I've been at CUNY since 2000 and in legal education for that long. So you hear, they were talking about diversity back then. They talked about diversity in 2006. They're talking about diversity now in the ABA standards, not just in legal education, but in law librarianship, but they've always talked about diversity and how do we get better? But something has happened, I'm not quite sure what to call it, but something has happened in the past three or four years where now it feels at least to me personally that it's going to stick if that makes sense, right? There are more people who are committed to making sure that this is raised in the classroom that we acknowledge it. And I mean, I really do think a lot of it is the momentum brought by students. So I'm encouraged by a lot of this and I'm encouraged by the work that seems to be kind of bubbling up and getting to the forefront. I'm encouraged by the fantastic number of law school deans who are now folks of color, women and who are moving this awareness forward. So that's kind of the thing that I was really glad to see as we were finishing up this book and sending out the press that we might've seemed like we were the first to do it in a certain way, but I know we're not going to be the last. And so I'm really encouraged by all of that. Does anyone else wanna share? I'll just note that there were some requests for more information about the title from Professor McMurtry-Chubb. I threw a link in the chat to the publisher's website. It's available for free download. It's part of a collection of other great works on fundamentals of law school teaching. And I guess that's another takeaway I have from the project is getting a chance to systematically uncover the wealth of information that's now available to us is always a privilege. I'll just chime in that this project has been just incredible because it's all hands on deck. I remember when I first talked to Nicole about this, I thought, what do I have to do with this? I don't teach any of the doctrinal subjects. But when Nicole said, we have to do this work, everyone has to do this work. And whether you're a student, you're a faculty member or a member of the staff, there is a contribution that everyone can be making and that are really valuable. So I just love the collaborative process. And I just think that's the biggest takeaway for me is like we all just need to keep pushing this, pushing this in any capacity, no matter where we fit in the hierarchy. This has to be done and it's hard work and it's sometimes thankless and it's exhausting and we screw up, but it's incredibly important. And I just feel like it's been a really, really incredible collaborative process. So this concludes our discussion today, but don't worry, there's more to come. Today was the first in a series of events that RW law and CUNY law will be co-sponsoring this academic year. During each session, we'll be featuring contributors from integrating doctrine and diversity, discussing their chapters and also sharing about the good days and the bad days when doing this work. So it's not just gonna be about the book, but about how we're doing this work and what we're doing with these book chapters. And so we have a date for our next event. Our next event is scheduled for October 26th and we'll be sending information out about it soon. Check your emails. And finally, let me leave you with some good news or good-ish news for everyone who wants to read another book. Our editorial team is currently in contract negotiations for a follow-up book which wrestles with integrating doctrine and diversity beyond the 1L curriculum. So stay tuned for more news about that. Thank you all so much for coming today and staying and listening and sharing and engaging and for all of the support.