 Hello everyone, and welcome to our program today. My name is Gregory Bowman and I have the honor and the privilege of serving as the Dean and a faculty member at Roger Williams University School of Law. And we're so pleased to welcome you today to our online event, Integrating Doctrine and Diversity, our speaker series on that topic. Today's topic is teaching diversity skills in bar-tested classes. But as we begin today and before we get to our program, I want to take a moment to reflect on the lands on which we reside and to read a land and labor acknowledgement. We are coming today from many places physically and remotely. And we want to acknowledge the ancestral homelands and the traditional territories of indigenous and native peoples who have been here since time in memorial. 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 in Bristol, Rhode Island. And so we acknowledge and we honor the Narragansett and the Poconocha people and so on, the original name of the land that our campus resides on. We also acknowledge that this country would not exist if it were not for the free enslaved labor of Black people. And we recognize that the town of Bristol and the very land on which our campus resides have benefited significantly from the trade of enslaved people from Africa. The economy of New England, Rhode Island, and more specifically of Bristol, Rhode Island was built from wealth generated to the triangle trade of human lives. During this time of national reckoning with our history of slavery and the disparate treatment of Black people, we honor the legacy of the African diaspora and of the Black lives, knowledge, and skills stolen due to violence and white supremacy. And 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, as lawyers, 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 upholders of justice, we believe that our students, who will soon be practitioners of law, can be and already are agents of change as well. Now, for those who are not familiar with this practice of reading a land and labor acknowledgement, why do we do this? I want to share with you a statement from Northwestern University's Native American and Indigenous initiatives, which explains it much better than I could. And I quote, it is important to understand the longstanding history that has brought you to reside on the land and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land acknowledgements and labor acknowledgements do not exist in a past tense or historical context. Colonialism is a current ongoing process and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation. So, welcome again to today's program. We are so glad that you were here. It is now my great pleasure to turn our virtual podium over to my colleague and our excellent and intrepid moderator for today, Nicole Dyslesky, who serves as Roger Williams University School of Laws Director of Special Programs. Nicole, the podium is yours. Thank you, Greg, I'm taking the virtual podium. Welcome everyone to the Integrating Doctrine and Diversity Speaker Series. Thank you for joining us. Today as our semester is winding down, today's event, teaching diversity skills in bar-tested classes, features five amazing professors from different law schools who teach in a variety of bar-tested subjects. Welcome Amika, Monica, Montre, Teya and Jeremiah. Thank you all to our audience for taking time to share your, thank you all and to our audience. And before we begin, I also wanted to make sure to invite everyone to the RWU Hosted Symposium at AALS on the afternoon of January 6th in a sunny San Diego. The topic is how law schools can make a difference. DEI work in the curriculum, in the classroom and in the courthouse. And it is co-sponsored by the new AALS DEIB section. I'm gonna start with a question for Jeremiah. Jeremiah is an associate professor at UMass Law where he teaches contracts, trusts and estates and remedies. Also, Jeremiah has been named Professor of the Year for a record six times. I feel like I am with UMass royalty right now. In the first volume of Integrating Doctrine and Diversity, your essay starts as follows. At initial glance, the idea of teaching implicit bias awareness to first year law students while espousing the doctrine of American contract law seems like a tall order, seems like a tall and difficult order. Intrinsically, the pedagogical demands that the traditional program of American law, legal education places in the first year curriculum, the objectives we put on the mastery of black letter, the recognition of theoretical and historical perspective behind the rules of law and the skills of legal analysis in first year courses make the idea of adding an introduction of implicit bias within the law of daunting. Nevertheless, because of the hierarchical nature of the profession and the pursuit of justice through law, itself are often limited by unconscious bias. I argue that placing students, future lawyers, directly on notice of this phenomenon from the start is imperative during the first year. And surprisingly, it can be done in a contracts course. Jeremiah, can you talk a bit about why and how you teach implicit bias awareness in your contracts class? Sure, but thank you first of all for such a lovely introduction and thank you for having me here and I'm excited to be here today. So your question is in two parts, how and why. How and why do I incorporate implicit bias into the teaching of contracts here at UMass? And we'll start with why. It's become especially clearer to me recently that progress for both a truly diverse and inclusive society requires both our laws and our norms to function together to drive towards those values. And the switch from row to dobs, the summer makes that very apparent to me. So moving to contracts in the first year as a bar-tested subject, it's important to engage in how our laws are shaped by implicit biases at the very beginning of the students' careers in law school because doing so shows that the dissonance at least in contracts between this idea that we have this freedom of contracting in a diverse world and how contract law actually hides that inequality at the same time, you know, just kind of buries it even though it exists. I want my students to not place their faith in the law upfront and not to take the law as highly regarded in that face value in the way at least the case method assumes. So I want them instead to be able to see how contracts can facilitate our lives, how we use contracts to write the story of our lives indeed. And now contracts is also at the same time used to inhibit lived experiences as well. So that's why I try to do what I do with contracts by integrating implicit bias teaching in contracts. Now, how do I do this? Well, I do this, for example, in one large way by challenging the concept of objectivity in contracts, pulling it out as a contract in and of itself. Contract law, you know, because American contract law is predominantly framed by the objective theory of contracting, the reasonable person standard. Contract law itself has this tendency to reflect the norms of a dominant status quo, particularly a viewpoint that's traditionally white, male, cisgender, and of a certain economic class. And that objective viewpoint can allow contracts to further mainstream implicit biases accordingly, which affects the ways we use or enforce contracts on an everyday basis. So I try to instill this by framing how the objective theory is used in contracts through cases, for example, where it's pertinent. In the chapter that I write in the book, I write about teaching a canonical case regarding the renewal of an employment contract at the turn of the 20th century, where a reasonable standard should have been used to interpret the party's dialogue. But I go further than just talking about what standard should have been used in that case. I also talk about, well, that standard of objectivity is set, likely within a realm where an Anglo sense of business agreement making was prominent and would likely then be used to judge reasonableness in that context. So what if that same objective standard was then used to judge the responses of an employee who was also an immigrant? Someone with perhaps some language barrier issues or was used to some sort of a different way of negotiating or different styles in negotiating or customs. Or what if I switch the gender of the parties and so on and so forth? And so then we get into a place where we can question the idea that if we are in a so-called diverse society that shouldn't the reasonableness standard or the reasonable person standard really reflect that diversity rather than the singular norms of a dominant status quo. And that's the critical angle I take. But other kinds of assumptions are also explored sometimes in my course as well, smaller ones, for example. For instance, last week we just covered the statute of frauds. And I had a moment when discussing the signature requirement for sufficient writing within the statute where I wrote my name in Chinese on the whiteboard and just questioned whether or not that would be an acceptable, that would qualify as a signature or under the statute. Or when we go over passages of the UCC, the Uniform Commercial Code, which uses the him, his pronoun exclusively, I change it on the spot in class today when I read it. These are smaller, but also quite important ways to show how contracts is a highly gendered, racialized and classist space. What I do is destabilize central assumptions about contracts and contract making in our society and seeing whether or not our laws can include other perspectives and lived experiences. So thank you very much for your question, Nicole. I really love that answer. Like really getting to the decentralizing it like seems to really speak to me. My next question, staying with the theme of teaching implicit bias to students in the first year, my next question is for Micah. Micah is the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and a professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law. She teaches civil procedure and evidence. Micah, in your essay in our first book, you talk about how professors might raise the issue of implicit or unconscious bias within the context of the federal pleading standard by asking students if the possibility of intentional discrimination based on implicit bias might impact a plaintiff's ability to meet the facial plausibility requirement. Can you talk a bit about how you weave implicit bias into a class on Rule 8A2? Sure. So Rule 8A2 is the federal pleading requirements as that a pleading must include a short and plain statement of the claimant's claim, their entitlement to relief essentially. It's super straightforward. At least it appears at first glance to be straightforward but we have these two really big Supreme Court cases quombly and equal, which tell us that Rule 8A2 has been interpreted to mean that there must be a facially plausible claim included for the complaint to survive a motion to dismiss. So that is all very like a high level and difficult for students to get, especially when they're just starting out in law school and we do get to pleading standards fairly early in my civil procedure course. So I decided just to make it more interesting to spend a lot of time thinking about discrimination and how one might go about pleading discrimination. And I sometimes do it within the context of employment. There's a Supreme Court case that's pre-quombly and equal that deals with federal pleading standards for a Title VII case. So I spent some time kind of looking at what the plaintiff alleged there, which is essentially that he is a person who is Hungarian, that his CEO was French, that he was terminated and replaced with someone who's French. Like that's basically the whole claim. So we talk a lot about whether those allegations actually are facially plausible. So we kind of, we read the case then we look at quombly and equal and then we go back to that case and consider whether it would meet the facial plausibility standard. So I get lots of opinions from the students, some of them saying, well, no, I mean, if you're gonna claim discrimination, you probably need to have more than just an allegation that you got replaced with somebody who is of a particular national origin. You need to have something more than that. So we talk about that a bit. I used to practice employment discrimination law. So I'm really comfortable with the McDonald Douglas burden shifting framework. So I'm able to talk to the students about that a bit. But I think that any professor who teaches civil procedure can have those conversations with students about how you plead discrimination, how you approve it, that's another thing, right? But you don't actually have to think about that too much when you're in the pleading stage. I also like to focus on this question of what if the discrimination is focused on implicit bias? And so in the fact pattern that we use, I ask what if the French CEO doesn't know that he's discriminating? Like if implicit bias is causing him to dislike this person who's Hungarian and he replaces that person with someone who's French, he has no conscious awareness that he's discriminating. Does that matter at all for this cause of action? And if it does make a difference, or if it's okay, like if it's actionable, right, that implicit bias might result in discrimination, how are you gonna plead that exactly? So I really kind of push students to think through what pleading looks like when it comes to this elusive claim of discrimination, which is what the Supreme Court calls it. It's hard to plead, hard to prove. And in the world of kind of post-twombly or twombly and equal, what does that mean for discrimination plaintiffs? Are they gonna be placed at a significant disadvantage? Because when you believe you've been discriminated against, let's say in the workplace, you don't really have any real proof of it at this very early stage. All you have is your belief, right? Maybe you know that you got replaced by somebody outside to protect the class, but you might not even know that. So how in the world do you survive this facial plausibility standard? So, and I say in my essay that it's a really nice way to introduce this idea of implicit bias to the students. And I think as Jeremiah said, let them know that this is an important thing that all lawyers must get, they must understand it. It's not just some additional thing we're tacking on just because we feel like it, but that it is an integral part of their education. And I do wanna note two other things. Since writing the essay, I've continued to try to integrate these topics of diversity and inclusion and systemic oppression into a civil procedure. And one of my fairly new assignments is to have students draft a complaint alleging discrimination. And it's not employment discrimination because it gets a little complicated with burden shifting frameworks and all of that. And I don't necessarily wanna have them focus on that too much so early in their legal education. So I usually find some common law claim. In the fall of 2021, for example, I created a fact pattern where a black man is shopping in a store. He selected a dress for his granddaughter. It's the only size eight or something like that. A white woman wants the dress. They get into a tussle over the dress and she calls the police on him. He gets arrested, has a night in jail. He gets out and now he wants to sue her for malicious prosecution. So I give the students the elements of the claim and I ask them as they are working on it and they can work on it in their own little law firm. So they get to form a group of maybe three or four, four or five students who will all decide what this complaint looks like. I ask them, how are you gonna plead this thing that is underlying the incident, which is the potential racial bias that the officers might have when they show up to deal with this incident. Was it malicious for this woman to make the call given kind of what's going on in our country? And it's really interesting to see how students deal with that issue. Some of them don't deal with it at all. An additional cause of action that I tell them they can use if they want is intentional infliction of emotional distress. I give them the elements for it and some of them came back with allegations that based on where we are in the country at the moment that it is extreme and outrageous to call the police on a black man if there is no real crime happening. And so it's really cool, I think, to see what they have to say. I also have students who kind of avoid the issue and don't wanna talk about the racial bias kind of undertones in a situation like that. But it's nice to just get the topic in front of them and kind of force them to deal with it in some way. The last thing that I've done, and then I'll turn it back over to you, Nicole, is I'm doing this thing called access to justice in civil procedure, which is looking at class and race issues and how they impact access to the civil justice system. So I start that out actually on the first day of class with the lecturer on Dred Scott and what it meant about access to the system for people of African descent. And then I kind of move forward with this history that gets us to a place today where everybody is supposed to have access to the system. However, there are these barriers that are out there that really block people from filing claims if they believe they have a good claim against their landlord, they're not gonna file it. And there are reasons why. A lot of it has to do with perceptions of the system, belief, a belief that the injustices in the criminal system spill over into the civil system. So there's a real opportunity to give the students context about these rules of civil procedure that they're learning rather than just teaching them the rules and saying, okay, this is gonna be on the bar exam so you need to know this. It's better for them, in my opinion, they become better lawyers by having kind of historical and social context for those rules. Thank you. Thanks, Micah. I'm gonna stick with you for a follow-up question. You concluded your essay in the book by stating, as I approach the discussion of federal pleading standards each semester, it's my hope the conversation reveals the obscure nature of discrimination and the attending obstacles plain to space post-Twombly Iqbal. Additionally, the discussion should allow the professor to introduce the topic of implicit bias in a non-threatening manner that ties the phenomenon to the drafting skills any good trial lawyer should have. In addition to learning about civil procedure, students participating in the discussion may gain some insight that will help them relate to their future clients and better understand the world around them. I noticed the phrase non-threatening in there. Can you talk a bit about why you chose the phrase non-threatening or the non-threatening approach and what benefits or drawbacks you see to it? Yeah, so I knew you were gonna ask me this because you told me before. And I was like, did I say non-threatening? And I was like, oh yeah, I did. So what did I mean by it? I think I meant two things by it. So non-threatening in that any civil procedure professor can get into these discussions, right? They can have this kind of discussion without feeling like they need to be an expert on all of systemic oppression, right? So it's non-threatening in that you're already gonna be talking about pleading standards. So why not work in a little bit of this discussion about implicit bias in a way that just kind of scratches the surface. You're not gonna get out there too far where you feel like you are outside your expertise. You're just kind of introducing the topic and maybe facilitating a little bit of discussion. What I also mean by non-threatening is that students who are in the room who don't wanna hear this because there are students who will not wanna hear anything about bias or systemic oppression or racism. They don't like it, right? They will potentially, I think, see the value and understanding that even if you personally don't think this is a real issue, if you're gonna be a good litigator, you need to know how to draft a complaint that might potentially include a claim like this because you might have a client one day who has experienced this. You have to get comfortable with it to a certain extent to be a good lawyer. And so it's not that I'm on my soapbox. I'm not preaching to you about this thing called bias. I'm trying to give you the skills that you need to be a good lawyer. And so I think that's the other meaning of non-threatening, that it's not, I'm not being preachy. I'm just trying to give you what you need, just like in any other course that you take here in law school that's a required course, we're giving you what we think you need to be successful. That's what I'm doing here, what I'm talking about implicit bias. So. I really appreciated that explanation. And I think it drops home something that is really important for me at least to say, which is law professors are experts. And while this stuff might be uncomfortable and this stuff being teaching diversity skills throughout the curriculum might be uncomfortable. If you do it within the realm that you are most comfortable, that can be a good first step. It can be an easy pickup that it doesn't have to be this big scary thing. And so I really love the use of the word non-threatening because it was like, hey, it's non-threatening to us as teachers. And I think it's good to remind faculty of that. So thank you. My next question is for Taya. These conversations are not just about the choice to teach diversity skills, but how to ground the teachings using pedagogical ideas and innovation. Taya is an associate professor of law at Rutgers Camden. Taya has taught criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence. In your essay and the first integrating doctor and diversity book you wrote, empirical research confirms that first gen law students, students of color and women all feel less inclined to voluntarily participate in class, which mirrors what I've seen in the classroom. With this in mind, I'm always on the lookout for ways to encourage students to reflect on how they and others are taking up space in the classroom to use a term I borrow from Professor Angela P. Harris. Taya, can you talk a little bit about how you do this, how you make students aware of the concept of taking up space and sort of when do you do it? Do you do it in the syllabus? Is it something you talk about in the first few classes? And then I guess, how does it go? So thank you so much for having me and I will say this, I've never had a good idea that I didn't hear from someone else first. And so here's an example of a good idea that actually I originally heard from Professor Irene Joe at UC Davis. And then I said, oh, I'm writing this chapter. And she said, oh, I got this idea from someone. And then it went back to Professor Harris. And so, and as I write in the book, the sort of big jury exercise I do during the semester is an idea I got from somebody else who got it from somebody else. So I'm a big believer that you should come to events like this because you hear good ideas and then you can use them yourself. So yes, I mean, the idea of taking up space really appealed to me as a concept, as a way of thinking about people participating in class because I think it can be sort of a less aggressive way of saying you're talking too much, right? Because I think people can respond to that in ways that they might feel like their back is up against the wall if you say you're talking too much or if you say to somebody you're not talking enough, right? That there might be lots of reasons why people are choosing to participate or not. And so what I ask students to do when I do this day one, it's part of my first lecture of the class is throughout this class, I want you to think about how you're taking up space. Are you taking up a lot of space, right? Are you sort of like the primary person in this room now and usually, do you take up no space? Do we sort of never hear from you? And be mindful of how you're taking up space and how others are taking up space, right? And so I think it gives us some language to talk about these things, both at the start of class but then I can come back to it later. And one of the things I say to students is you can ask me how much space you're taking up. I'll have that conversation with you. And students will often say, what's your perception of how much space I'm taking up? Or it's a way for me to talk to someone and say, I love what you're bringing to the classroom. I love what you're contributing but you are taking up a lot of space. And I think maybe now is the time to think about giving other people that space. And so, from my perspective, it helps us think about how we're both being perceived by others, perceiving others, communicating with others. And I think that's a really important job for a lawyer is to think about what their role is when they enter a courtroom or enter a conference room and how they're communicating with other people in that conference room and doing that effectively is being mindful of how they're talking. And so I use this exercise. It's a jury instruction exercise or it's a jury exercise and I write about it in my chapter. And part of the jury exercise is to get the students thinking about the role of the jury but also thinking about, we let late people make these decisions every day. People who do not have expertise, people who are not trained lawyers or law professors, we give them the law and then we let them hear a bunch of facts and then they apply the law to those facts. And it's my way of reminding the students, you're entirely capable of doing this work because in fact, we let people with no experience do this work because we think juries are really important and they have this historical role. And so I have them go and sit as jurors in this case and decide the case. And after we are finished with the exercise, we talk about the law, right? And it's this way to learn and it's the law of self-defense is what I focused on. But then I spend some time also talking about what was the experience of being in that jury room? Because in theory, everyone is supposed to have their voice heard. Like that's how a jury is supposed to work. So did everyone get their opportunity to express their opinion? Was everyone's opinion valued? If it wasn't, let's talk about it. And I think it gives people a sense of a little bit of distance from having these conversations that might be tricky because it's not like they're talking necessarily about themselves, but they were in this role play. But of course, they were probably behaving similarly to how they would behave in the classroom. And so it gives us an opportunity not just to talk about the law, but just to also have a conversation about, what was that interaction like? And was it positive or negative? And what's fascinating is that sometimes, things really did get heated or people felt that their voices were totally excised from the conversation. And I think it gives us an avenue into having those sort of tough conversations about how we interact with others. I think two things are interesting in what you said. One is the perception. So the perception of themselves and then the perception of how someone is perceiving them. And then there's sort of the, when you blow that up to the professional identity issue, how lawyers are perceived or how they perceive themselves. I think all of that is really interesting. I also, I tried in a class last semester to give them some of the empirical data and say, hey, like in some cases, one might argue that the law classroom was not meant for some people. And here's some of this empirical research. And some of the students' reactions were very negative to this. Like, how dare you stereotype me? But some of the students' reactions felt like seen and heard. Like, oh, so maybe my not talking is common among people that look like me or have my background or have my gender. And I thought that was sort of interesting how it hit different people. So thank you for sharing about that. And I am next going to talk to Monica. Monica is a professor of law here at Roger Williams University School of Law where she teaches property and family law. She also teaches in our brand new required race in the foundations of American law class where she co-teaches with none other than me. And Monica works a lot with first gen students and writes and thinks about first gen student issues. And you do so within the context of required bar-tested classes. Can you talk a bit about how you wrestle with some of these issues in the classroom and what impact you've seen this have on students? Thank you so much, Nicole. I'm really happy to be here today and absolutely some of the research that I've done into first generation students and how they are acclimating to the law school experience, how they feel in the classroom. One of the issues that comes up is around the invisibility by and large of the first gen identity. And so when we're talking about first generation students, students may not necessarily know which peer may also come from a similar family background who may not also have a parent who graduated from a four year college. And so it's important, I think for me, in my role as professor to normalize that experience. And so when you couple the first generation experience with just some of the anxieties that law students generally tend to have. So for instance, studies have shown that law students tend to have a lot of anxiety around just how they're perceived by others. And so that's generally applicable to law students and then specifically to first gen students, they tend to be more sensitive to whether or not they're accused that might signal to others among them, whether peer or professor, that they are from a specific socioeconomic demographic. And all of that combined can basically create a cognitive load, right? It can be cognitively demanding for that student in the classroom to be dealing with all of that in addition to just learning property law, which is one of the courses that I teach. So for me, there's a learning, there's a very specific learning objective that I have. And that is I really think that by doing some of these techniques, I can actually enable students to be more effective learners. So I wanna convey to them a message that it's okay to be exactly who they are in the classroom. They don't have to modify their presentation, their speech, their identity, their background in order to be successful. And in teaching, my go-to is Bell Hooks. So I wanna just give you one of her quotes as a frame for some of the specific examples that I have around what I do in the property classroom. So Bell Hooks wrote a book called Teaching Critical Thinking. And she writes, when professors courageously share personal experience in a manner that illuminates assigned material, we help lay the foundation for building an authentic learning community. By making ourselves vulnerable, we show our students that they can take risks, that they can be vulnerable, that they can have confidence that their thoughts, their ideas will be given appropriate consideration and respect. So much along the lines of what Teya was just mentioning in terms of taking up space in the classroom. So in property law, for those of you that remember or who also teach property, when zoning is covered, one of the key cases is Euclid, okay? And in the Euclid case, we have this case from the 1920s, 1926, goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court is basically determining whether or not to uphold municipal zoning as constitutional. And it ultimately does do that, but in the course of doing so, there's quite a bit of problematic imagery in terms of how municipal zoning is explained as furthering this goal of protecting the general welfare. And part of that has to do with this infamous description of the apartment house, okay? So some of you may know where I'm going with this, but the apartment house, the multifamily in the Euclid decision is referred to as a parasite, okay? It's referred to as a parasite and some of the language in that case, for instance, says the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering with the free circulation of air, monopolizing the rays of sun, and there's imagery about how we wanna be able to protect children in these communities. And that's why we might, for instance, have single-family zoning in certain areas and not allow the multifamily. So I turn to the students and I basically say, okay, I remember reading this in law school. And it was really difficult to read because I came to this country as an immigrant. We lived in an old mill town here in Rhode Island, Pawtucket, in triple-deckers. So the court is basically saying what? Is the court saying that children who are living in these homes, they're not as entitled to clean air, right? To safe streets. And so I mentioned that. I mentioned my experience, my background, and that way a student doesn't have to share, but if they're comfortable doing so, they can. But at the very least, what my hope is, is that they say, okay, it's okay for me to be who I am to have had this background and to be here in this classroom and to take up space. So that's one of the examples. Also in property, I teach concurrent tendencies. Okay, so those of you who remember, we've got our tendencies in common. We have joint tendencies with the right of survivorship. And I wanna try to explain to students again, I always have very clear pedagogical goals, right? That I have in mind, but I'm explaining the distinctions. And I say, okay, why might, for instance, a working class family who wants to be homeowners, why might they find this form of ownership appealing, right? And I talk about my parents and I say, listen, my parents worked in factories, they were struggling to become homeowners. So they had a couple that was their friends from childhood back in Cape Verde and they purchased a duplex together as tenants in common. And we go through and we explain all the elements of these various forms of concurrent ownership. And we talk about the pros and cons. And I have these illustrations and I say, in our case, we had these amazing neighbors. I give them the names. I say Silvia and Marcelo, they were wonderful, but what if they weren't wonderful, right? What would be the downside of having this form of ownership? And so I basically wanna have these examples. Again, I use my experiences, but I wanna normalize that not everybody who's in this law school setting lived in maybe a suburban community or had a single family dwelling and I wanna make that the norm and I want them to feel comfortable because my hope is ultimately this will take some of the pressure off. They will be more effective learners. And as Taya had mentioned, they will feel more comfortable taking up that space in the classroom. Thanks, Monica. It also is modeling that vulnerability can be a value of our profession and whether that's law and lawyering or whether that's law and legal education, I think like leaning into our vulnerability isn't bad. And I love how the example you use sort of models that. I'm moving on to our next speaker, Montre. Montre is a professor of law at Alabama Law and teaches civil procedure and evidence. While you may know her work from the classroom or her scholarship, she also has provided legal commentary in a variety of media outlets like NPR, Fox News and the AP. Thank you for being here today because we're definitely not as cool as NPR. Montre is an author of an essay in our forthcoming volume out next year. Her essay really moved all of us editors and I might have cried. And it is specifically about teaching diversity skills in what she calls a hostile teaching environment. Can you talk a bit about your definition of a hostile teaching environment and perhaps share some of your lessons that you have learned from your experiences? Thank you so much for having me and for that introduction. And I'm sorry that it made you tear up a little bit. I probably teared up as I was writing it to be honest with you. It's been, I don't think I've ever really just, I've written about teaching in a hostile environment one time I did an op-ed and I don't think I've ever really spoken about it. So this will be the first time I've spoken about it. But yeah, teaching in a hostile environment to me, the way I define it is where the professor and or certain groups of students are regularly subjected to disrespect and made to feel unwelcome. And I've had that over the years here at Alabama. I've been here for 15 years. And it's not just me. Other women of color have come through and there's a common theme and with some white women as well. There's this disrespect, I think. And the key is, and I want to be clear about this, it's not everybody. It's not all students. And that's something that I have to remind myself of when I do go through these issues and it's not necessarily every class. I teach evidence mainly now that's my big class and for a while here at Alabama we taught evidence as a first year class which is not a good idea for those of you who've ever taught evidence or even for those of you who've taken it. That's not a good idea. And the vast majority of law schools across the country evidence is an upper level class. We teach it as an upper level class now but for several years and my pre 10 year years I'll add it was a first year class which meant that you have a very difficult class in the first year curriculum, second semester, first year. You have students who didn't choose me and probably would not have chosen me because I am a black woman. They probably would never have chosen to take me. So they're being forced to take me. They're taking a very difficult class and I don't make it necessarily easy. I don't try to water down the material in the way some people have suggested. You know, I've had people kind of suggest to me as a way to cope is maybe water it down. And I don't do that. I think that's a disservice to the students. So one key thing to remember going back to a point I just made was that it's not everybody but just a handful of students can really make your life miserable in a class and can really disrupt the environment. What I've learned over the years is that you can't really take it personally. And what I mean by that, it is personal. Don't get me wrong. And I think that if we react in a way that the sensitive to it, that's okay. I mean, because we're human, right? But what I say it's not personal. I mean, it's not about me. It's that student's problem. Some students are just not ready to receive instruction from a black woman. And we just have to be honest about that. They're just not. And there's nothing that I can do about it. And I can't take that as something that's wrong with me and think that I can necessarily fix it because I can't. And so, there are some that I can give you some examples that not only are they not ready to receive instruction from me, they actually see me as their peer, not as an authority figure on the law, not as an expert on the law. So this past time that I taught evidence, I actually had a student who said right up front, kind of in the middle section of the classroom was a large classroom over 50 students in the class who regularly would quiz me, he would look up, he would spend time on the internet in class trying to look up difficult concepts and quiz me to see if he could trip me up during class. And other students saw people talk, and that's the thing people talk about it outside of class too, when they see this type of thing happening. Those are difficult things to have to deal with. That's a hostile environment, and that's just one example. And like I said, typically these are students who don't wanna see you as authority figures because they've never had that, a lot of them never have had that. Some students have never had a black woman professor, they may not have had a black woman teaching them. I think back with my own law school time, my own time in higher education, I had one black woman professor in undergrad and one in law school. And for some students, they've had none, they've had, they've not had that interaction so they're not ready for that. So yeah, some students will see me as a peer, they make the classroom environment competitive when it shouldn't be like that. And it really can make it very difficult. So in that type of environment, there's no way that I'm going to devote significant time to focusing on race because I'm already dealing with that issue. I'm kind of in, I walk in and I kind of embody race in the law for some people, if for some people that's enough, I've had a black woman professor, that's all I can take right now. So if students raise issues in class because I do have, and it's changing too, our student body has changed and attitudes are changing. If some students bring up issues of race in class, I absolutely will address those issues. I don't shy away from them, but I don't make it central in assignments. I also have a casebook that has some passing mention from time to time of issues of race. We have a new edition of that casebook coming out and the email that I got that was advertising that new edition said that in response to student demand about with respect to racial justice, some sections have been added. So it'll be interesting to see, I'm going to continue to use the book. It'll be interesting to see the student reaction to more of a focus in the casebook. I don't think there'll be central focus, the central focus in the casebook on race issues, but it'll be interesting to see how the students react to maybe passages, excerpts from articles, et cetera, following certain material. So that being said, it's not like I won't talk about race because I will. It's just, I don't feel like I can do it the way that it deserves to be done in a hostile environment. That's what I was getting at in the essay. To me, if you're not, and this is my view, if race isn't really a central focus, if we're not honest, that race touches, it permeates every area of the law. In evidence law, for example, how could you think that this is a race-neutral set of rules? For a long time, Black people weren't even allowed to testify at trial. So the rules were developed with a white-centered focus. How could we think that this is race-neutral? So if I were teaching evidence the way that I think it should be taught, that I would start with that. No, this is not objective. This is not race-neutral. That doesn't really work in a class where you're regularly subjected to a hostile environment. What I found is that the best way to do it is you just have to have an upper-level class where students self-select and they're ready to receive from you. And that's been the blessing out of the difficulty that's come along with teaching some of these classes from year to year is that I've created classes that allow me, I've introduced classes to the curriculum, that allow me to teach evidence and race issues the way that it really should be taught. I've written articles about race literally as evidence. And so that's how I start a class that I call Major Race Trials. That's how I start that course. But that's my response. That's a hostile environment. And those are just some of the strategies that I would use to deal with it. The main one being, and I put that in the piece, the strategies, the main one being is create an island at that law school, because if you as a professor are being subjected to hostile treatment, you know what the students who are from outsider groups are being subjected to and they need a space, they need those types of classes too. They need that type of refuge. That's such an excellent point. And I'm gonna sort of follow up with anyone else, Micah, Taya, Jeremiah or Monica who wants to answer this next one. Who else experiences or has experienced pushback when diversity comes into focus in a bar tested class? How have you dealt with it or diffused it? In my experience, students are resistant sometimes to engage in discussions and devote class time to topics that are not on the bar. So does anyone wanna jump in about how they deal with pushback and engage some of us? Hi, Nicole, I can take this or at least a portion of it, but for me, it's really important to always explain to students why I'm doing what I'm doing. At least that's what I strive to do. And so for instance, there is learning science that suggests that providing students with a context within which to then embed legal rules standards that that's helpful for them to become better learners. I also try to, even though I'm teaching these required or strongly recommended courses, I'm always trying to link it to lawyering skills. And so basically explaining to students, and I think Montray was saying this earlier, that when you get out into practice, you're not going to be able to avoid issues of race and class and gender. And so if we're not preparing you now in the classroom, we're really doing a disservice to your professional identity formation, which is a significant component of what we are supposed to be doing as law professors in this setting. I think I'm gonna jump in here and also echo both with Monica and actually what Micah I think said earlier as well, that in certain circumstances where there's resistance, or sometimes when somebody like what Montray said, the student is not ready to receive this information about diversity that they may have not understood and it's sort of destabilizing their sense of reality. Often it's about bringing the lesson back to relevance, right? There's a, just like what Monica was talking about just a few seconds ago about teaching pedagogy, along those lines that was she was saying, relevance is also a real important key element in teaching as long as the students can see why it's relevant, they will learn it, even if it's painful. And that quite frankly has been the secret to my entire career in some ways. And what I do not just with teaching diversity issues within the bar tested course, but also previously as a bar director teaching bar courses and trying to show students why it's relevant that they're learning the things that they're learning. So in the situation where there's resistance, I think I echo with my colleagues here, it's important to show the students why it's important to recognize that the law can be quite hierarchical or quite pernicious in the way that it's structured. Even though in law schools, we place so much faith in the law, we think that we're super agents because we have the ability to practice the law, understand it, and so on and so forth. And yet it's got flaws, right? And to be able to acknowledge that and to say, that's gonna help you be a better, more empathic advocate and also a better citizen of the world, often we'll start to make them realize, oh, there's something in it for me. Unfortunately, this is sort of bringing up interest convergence under critical race theory, but in some small way, but it is a step at least in engaging that conversation. And it's also important to do this over and over again in the classroom to show why these moments are important and relevant to teach. Micah, did you wanna jump in on this too? Yeah, just real quick. So I know that for me, in terms of my evolution and addressing these issues and building and building every year, sometimes I'll get students who ask me, is this on the exam? Like if it's not on the exam, okay, I'll kinda have to listen. So I'm at the place now where I'm like, it's on the exam. Yes, I'm gonna ask you some kind of like grad level thing. I'm giving you fact patterns. We'll do that part, yeah, absolutely. But I'm gonna ask you something very broad about systemic inequities and I want you to answer that question for me. So it's on the exam. And so it may not be in the bar exam, it's on my exam and that's gonna make them pay attention to it and it's taken me a while to really get there because of the fear of the pushback, because of the fear that it was gonna affect me in some way or somebody's gonna go and complain about me. But at this point, I'm much more comfortable doing it. And again, understanding that's where we are in like this reckoning or whatever, this racial reckoning that we've had, right? We're at a place where people get it, we have to deal with this, we have to talk about it. And so it's on the exam. So I encourage folks to kind of move in that direction. You can also make it a part of participation. If you have a bucket of points for participation, it's past fail, but you have to do it. A reflective is really valuable. So write me 250 words on what you think about this thing. If you don't do it, it might, you might lose some participation points. It's just an opportunity for students to be able to process these things and it counts toward the grade, even if it's not, you know, graded in kind of the traditional way that we think about law school courses being graded. Thanks. I was just having this conversation in class on Tuesday, a student responded that they feel like there is too much sort of rote work in the first year and not enough reflective practice on what they're learning and that it really makes it harder to learn to not be like reflecting on the things they're learning. And so I think it's really great that you brought that up. As I host this series, and I write in the area of integrating doctorate and diversity and I've been speaking with faculty from all over the country, it has struck me over and over and over again that part of the pushback from students is directly tied to our identities as a teacher. Said differently, white appearing teachers, male identified teachers, older teachers may receive less or different pushback than professors with other identities. Does anyone want to specifically address this and give any advice about how to navigate student reactions or biases about your identity and these important diversity discussions? I'm happy to give my perspective. And of course, it's like so tied to who you are and how, as you noted, sort of when you walk into the classroom, what are people seeing? And I think certainly as a woman, I have had pushback in the past and early in my career, I could feel that profoundly at times. And one of the things I tried to do is channel my grandmother, Millie. My grandma, Millie was the first woman to practice law in the state of North Dakota. And she really believed like humility was for suckers and she would tell you that she got the highest grade on the North Dakota bar exam the year she, I mean, you know, she would tell you how great she was all the time, which, you know, sometimes I would roll my eyes at, but I now kind of realize looking back on it that I think she was constantly having to prove that she belonged as a member of the bar, that she should be a lawyer and that this sort of spring from that. Like I have to show people that I am deserving of being here and practicing law. And she has, you know, crazy stories of, you know, it took her 30 years to become a partner in the practice that my grandfather ran. So even being married to the lead partner, she had some struggles becoming a partner. So, you know, I have now found in my own, it's not that humility is for suckers, you need some humility, but you also should, as you were noting like law professors or experts and you shouldn't shy away from being like, I'm an expert and here's why I'm an expert. And like, here's what I did before, here's what I'm doing now. And I think you have to be careful about the way you do it. But I think I used to think like that was unseemly to talk about my expertise. And I have now found that I think it's really important to be like, I was a public defender. I'm, you know, the reporter for the ABA task force on plea bargaining. I'm doing this, I'm doing here because I think it affirms for the students like I'm somebody you should listen to on this topic. And so when I'm telling you these things, you know, you're resisting somebody who has expertise and not to shy away from that. And when, you know, kind of instinctually I do and then I just have to find my inner grandma Millie and, you know, sort of brag. And I think that's okay. I really struggle with it because I don't like the sort of banking model of education where I'm at the front of the room and I'm teaching something and I'm the expert. But at the same time, I get pushback presumably for my gender, maybe for my age, I don't know, I don't ask, I don't have a questionnaire. But there's these things where like, I'm trying to like decolonize the classroom and at the same time, I have to puff my chest up and, you know, change who I am in order to be taken seriously. And it's a real struggle. And again, I have a ton of privilege. I can't imagine what it's like to have less privilege than this, but it is really a struggle. Micah, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I was gonna say that this struggle is one I can really relate to, especially as a younger professor when I honestly didn't know my material as well as I know it now. And so I would routinely get quizzed and I'd be lustered. I just didn't expect it to happen. Then I got to a point where I expected it so I was really ready. And at this point, it's been like 15 years. So I'm like, I definitely know all this stuff better than you guys, you know, like I have it all. I know every footnote, I got the rules memorized, you know. So I feel like kind of more comfortable in my skin. And I like to, my style is like joke around and, you know, make fun of these really complex rules, but let's kind of break it down if we can into ways that we can understand it. So my personal style of teaching is much more kind of conversational to lots of jokes. I am pretty vulnerable. So I just feel more comfortable even saying like, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that, but I'll get back to you because I can find anything if you give me 30 minutes. You know, I just, I'll email you after class, but I don't know everything about civil procedure. I don't know everything about evidence. It is what it is. But, and specifically about kind of the pressure or the expectation I think that students have when they see me in the front of the classroom. Yeah, they're gonna think I'm on like a particular soapbox, I'm on that soapbox so whatever, I'm just gonna be there. Like that's how it is. But I respect everybody. I want them to be critical thinkers. I tell them, like challenge everything. I say question everything, including me. Don't believe it just because I say, so go do your own research and figure it out because I want them to always be questioning. Just today, I present at one of my papers at the tour of the end of civil procedure pleading which is its own course where we just do the rules. And I was talking about juror bias and I have a paper on it. And I would never do something like that in the past. Like I would never say, hey, look at my stuff. Cause it's like my little baby and I'm worried about them criticizing it. But that shows my expertise. I can say, yeah, this is published in this law review. Here's some of the research I use. This is something you ought to be aware of. And I actually get to quote Montre because I'm a fan and I love your work. So I've got, I've cited you in multiple articles. So it's just, I'm like, it is what it is. And then you can like leave and like dislike me but I'm in an environment that where I don't have that explicit kind of attacking that hostile environment. I don't, I don't have that. And there is a real difference between that kind of environment and where I am right now. Tray, did you want to jump in? Yeah, and you're right. There is a difference. I've been in an environment that wasn't like that. So I can compare, that's the other thing. It's key to know that everywhere is not like this. And it was very valuable to me to have been at another law school before where the students were very different. The classroom environment was a very different one. So I knew that it wasn't me and that everywhere isn't like this. But one thing I could just add to it is, you know, what I don't do and what I've learned over the years not to do, I don't dim my light for anybody. I don't necessarily talk a whole lot about what I've done unless going back to what somebody else was saying, unless it's relevant. I just pulled that word out that I heard during this session unless it's relevant. So I had a student who asked me a question about, I think we were talking about expert testimony and, you know, aren't lawyers always experts on the law? For example, and so, so, you know, could you, is there a problem when you hire an expert that might be a lawyer? And I said, well, you know, and I'm not, I can't remember exactly how the question went. But I was like, well, you know, one time I was hired to be an expert on foreign law. And so I gave an example of that. It was, you know, an issue in Canada. And I went to get the question correct. We were talking about the judge as the expert on the law. And so we don't need under the expert testimony rules, experts to come in and tell what the law is. Well, one time actually I did go in to tell the judge what the law was because it was an issue of foreign law. It was foreign to them. It was, you know, in a Canadian court. So I gave that example. So when it's relevant, I'll weave it in. But it's not because, you know, I'm showing off for anything like that is because it mattered and it helped her to understand. It was a way that I could answer the question. There were times perhaps maybe when I first started that I would have thought that sounds like bragging. But it's relevant and I'm not gonna shrink myself to make other people feel comfortable. And so I would encourage people. I'm just, I'm myself. I'm just who I am. Take it or not, take it or leave it, receive it or not. You know, I do the best that I can, but I do not dim my light for anybody. We take it, we receive it, we love it. And that is the best advice to end on. This was like the quickest hour, which means that I'm going to invite you all back and to do this all over again. I just wanna end sort of taking a moment to recognize my own privilege in this discussion. One of the hardships that some law professors face is teaching at a public university and in a state with an anti-CRT law. I really would like to host a session on that topic specifically, but I don't want anyone to have to come forward and put themselves at even more risk. So I just wanna take a moment to celebrate my own institution, our co-sponsor institutions and all of the law schools out there that are working to support faculty heed the call of teaching, so-called divisive topics aside Black Letter Law. Thank you to all involved in speaking today and running these webinars. This is our last ID&D for 2022. We will see you back in 2023 and have a great rest of the year.