Legal Education, Feminist Epistemology, and the Socratic Method

Susan Williams is a professor of law at Indiana University School of Law (Bloomington) and previously clerked on the D.C. Circuit for Ruth Bader Ginsburg (my absolute heroine).  Williams’ article, “Legal Education, Feminist Epistemology, and the Socratic Method,” examines the use of the Socratic Method and other pedagogies and the impact they may have on educating women.  She also examines other articles on this subject, most notably, Deborah Rhodes’ paper, which criticizes both the style and substance of contemporary legal education from a feminist point of view (finding the pedagogy to be hierarchical and authoritarian, emphasizing students’ inadequacies and encouraging counterproductive competitiveness).

Time for a New Pedagogy?

Williams believes that the way law is taught (taking emotions, morals, and values out of the discussion) hinders learning, especially for women.  “That is, we cannot really understand a case without understanding its context and its personal impact.  The knowledge afforded by the traditional legal curriculum is, therefore, woefully inadequate to the task of lawyering and also, I believe, to the task of thinking about the law.  In other words, there is an epistemological failure here as well as a moral failure” (S. H. Williams 1993, 1573). Further, the use of the Socratic Method, seemingly harmless, “has become the repository for all of the problems of mainstream epistemology” (S. H. Williams 1993, 1574).

Questions on the Status of Women Law Students

After studying the status of female students at the University of Iowa Law School, where Jean C. Love is a professor, she identified twenty questions that would reveal the status of women law students at any given law school.  These questions can be used by administrators to identify areas that are lacking and prospective students concerned about gender discrimination or disparity.  When she utilized these questions to examine where women stood at her own school she found that:

1. The qualifications of the entering female students were comparable to those of the entering male students;
2. The grade point averages of the female students at the end of their first year were comparable to those of the male students; [1]
3. The grade point averages of the female students at the end of their third year were comparable to those of the male students;[2]
4. Women were selected for membership in The Order of the Coif in proportion to their representation in the class;
5. The percentage of male and female students who participated in law school activities were comparable; [3]
6. The percentage of male and female students who received faculty-chosen honors upon graduation were comparable. 

Legal Education Reform, Diversity, and Access to Justice

Anderson’s article, “A Legal Education Prospectus,”  is in response to three reports in reforming legal education: The MacCrate Report, Best Practices, and the Carnegie Report.  It is Anderson’s belief that while all three reports provide helpful information and ideas for reform, none examine the grave crisis in lack of legal representation to those belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups and how law schools hold the power (by admitting more diverse students) to change the legal profession crisis.  This article is focused on minorities’ lack of presence in law school transferring to a lack of non-lawyer minorities’ lack of legal representation and access to justice.  However, parallels are drawn to the issue between minorities and women, such as the fact that both students of color and female students are often attracted to experiential learning opportunities and may better flourish in a curriculum that integrates doctrinal theory and practical skills and that such experiential and clinical courses aid the poor and disenfranchised which furthers the access to legal help to those in need.   

A Forked River Runs Through Law School

Timothy Clydesdale examines the differences in race, gender, and age on law school performance and bar passage using Law School Admissions Council data (the Bar Passage Study or “BPS”) which includes a dataset of 27,478 entering law students, along with their grade point averages, LSAT scores, bar examination results (up to five attempts) and of course the race, gender, and age of those individuals.  Having this detailed information allows Clydesdale to reveal how race, gender, or age might impact one’s predisposition for success.  Moreover, by controlling for various factors (which I will explain further in this summary) Clydesdale is able to hypothesize why or why not such predispositions within a given class (race, gender, age) may appear.  For example, once Clydesdale had determined that students over the age of 30 earned inferior grades to those under 30, Clydesdale was able to pinpoint why that might be – that rather than physical age, it is that students over the age of 30 have a greater likelihood to experience life events during the 1L year which hinder the student’s success, restrictions on study time (due to family responsibilities and demands), and a greater chance of being impacted by physical illness.  Nevertheless, there is a “4% gap in passage rates between those bar examinees who began law school at age 30 or older and their younger counterparts” (Clydesdale 2004, 713).  Clydesdale determines that law school grades correspond directly to bar passage rates; so knowing that law students over thirty are more likely to earn lower grades, it is not surprising that this also translates to lower bar passage rates.  Most importantly, Clydesdale sheds light on the disparity between the groups and even the disparity in six-categories of law schools. 

A Timeline of Women’s History in the Legal Profession

I am excited to announce the completion of my timeline of women in the legal profession, which spans 372 years, beginning in 1638.  I have integrated the timeline into this blog and it can be viewed, here. However, the timeline is over 15 pages long and the formatting on the blog makes this less reader-friendly.  Viewing it as a PDF is a much more useful way to make use of this piece and the PDF can be viewed (and even searched through), here, using Google Docs (its available to the public – no login required).

View the Timeline.