Law Students for Reproductive Justice commissioned a study of reproductive rights legal courses in American law schools, and the results are pretty predictable: Only 18% of U.S. law schools have offered reproductive rights law courses at some point over the last seven years, and half of those courses were only taught once. On the LSRJ blog, Liz Kukura writes:
Having dedicated reproductive rights law courses in the course catalog is critical—not only as important training for those law students who will pursue careers in reproductive justice and social justice work, but also as an opportunity for all future lawyers to be exposed to the many complex and compelling reproductive justice topics that raise issues of criminal law, constitutional law, property law, contract law, health law, family law, bioethics, and more. We miss entirely too much when discussion of reproductive rights is limited to a day’s worth of Griswold and Roe in con law class.
Above the Law’s writers and commenters, though, seem to disagree. Ami Cholia says:
But given that most lawyers take constitutional law (to say nothing of the interested parties who take family law, health law, and whatever the hell else 3Ls take in order to maintain an unblemished GPA), is a specific course in reproductive rights even necessary? Academic classes rarely give one a true representation of how the concepts we study play out in real life (think back to your middle school sex-ed class for a minute). That is usually learned on the job. You are trained to ask the right questions and argue your point effectively — a rounded understanding of law, then, should prepare you to take on a reproductive case, regardless.
Should we interpret the dearth of repro-rights courses as representative of gender-imbalance at schools and within the profession at large? Again, I don’t think so. It’s not about man v. woman or even life v. abortion. It’s about rights. And as a trained lawyer, you are taught about those rights. Reproductive rights aren’t special rights, are they?
But am I missing something entirely?
I think what Ami is missing is that reproductive rights law is a highly contentious, continually evolving area of law that in part because of its divisiveness isn’t given the class time necessary to really feel out all of the issues involved. And, while this probably wasn’t LSRJ’s point, one of my biggest frustrations with law school was that the reality of how the law impacts peoples’ lives was totally divorced from what we were learning in class. Class discussions were rarely justice-based; we were taught how to pick apart a legal theory or cobble together a “correct” conclusion based on legal precedent, but didn’t get so much into how a common-law system normalizes certain experiences and erases the realities that a lot of people live (and particularly realities lived by marginalized people). Reproductive justice coursework, I would hope, might force students to get a little bit beyond the comfort that reliance on consistency can bring. It’s not just that the topic itself is important (although it is) but also that legal discussions about the fundamentals of human existence — sex, reproduction, birth — inherently require law students to diverge from the hyper-logical, consistency-above-all pattern of thinking that we spend three years relying on. That of course doesn’t mean that you take the legalism out of it, or that repro justice courses would be more like liberal arts classes than law school ones; it does mean that when we’re discussing how the laws actually impact the human body, it’s a little harder to take the human being involved out of the conversation.
And my personal theories about how legal education could be improved aside, reproductive justice courses should be logical offerings in law schools that regularly feature classes on things like environmental law, immigration law, art law, health law, critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and on and on. All of those specialized courses address legal issues that are dynamic and important, but aren’t covered in-depth in other law classes and may not end up being what one does as a career. Reproductive justice fits into the type of legal coursework that law schools and law students value, and I suspect that the reason it’s avoided is because it’s so controversial. That’s a shame, and law students are missing out because of it.
How much of this do you think is also driven by perceived demand for the courses by enrolled law students and the extremely careerist attitudes of many of them….especially those whose ambitions is to work for a large corporate oriented law firms for the high pay and perceived prestige?
From chatting with many law students/practicing attorneys over the years in academic and professional contexts, it seems there is strong disdain among most for 2L and 3L electives which are associated with progressive/social justice causes. Some have even said the electives they had to take to complete their last two years of law school were a complete waste of their time and added “unnecessary debt” they had to pay off once they graduated.
In short, how much of this has to do with the seeming contestation between law school’s raison d’etre as an academic intellectual education and training school for a profession?
It has been some time since I was in law school, but I seem to remember that most cross-sectional classes were mediocre at best. Besides an over reliance on the negative dialectic generally, I would like to see more non-traditional classes actually taught by faculty from other disciplines in the university.
If I had my way, I would allow the entire third year to be some form of rigorous independent study. It would be more than just writing your journal note and more akin to a formal dissertation. It seems that studies such a reproductive justice would be ripe for a cross sectional class with a medical school or other health provider majors within the university. It would also be a very interesting area for independent study.
I wonder if a practicum might be a better idea than a course. Lots of schools have clinics, but reproductive law doesn’t quite fit into that mold. Of course, the biggest problem is demand driven, if there were a market for social justice work then law schools would teach it. As it stands, law school cost somewhere in the range of $100,000, so unless you have a great deal of money stashed somewhere law students have to make choices based on their future employability.
“it seems there is strong disdain among most for 2L and 3L electives which are associated with progressive/social justice causes.”
That was my experience in law school as well. There was a running joke among the student body that “____ and the Law” courses were jokes and unimportant to the real business of becoming a lawyer. These courses are avoided not only because they’re controversial, but because they’re devalued. “Real” lawyers-to-be take Secured Transactions and Commercial Law, not Critical Race Theory, right?
Regarding learning about reproductive rights in Con Law, it’s been awhile, but from I remember the discussion was centered around the “cobbling” together of precedent to come to Roe’s conclusion. The issue wasn’t approached from a feminist perspective, or indeed from any perspective other than the “neutral” perpsective of precedent, as though following precedent isn’t, in itself, a political consideration.
The survey does not count family law, sex equality, sexuality, or reproductive technology courses as “reproductive rights” courses in coming to those figures. I took classes in family law and sex equality that addressed reproductive rights in depth: abortion, sterilization, surrogacy, adoption, parental leave, custody and child support, abuse of children, the right to make parental decisions, and removal of children from unfit parents. I understand that it’s not possible to tell how much reproductive rights are covered in broader classes, but I think it would be very difficult to teach a family law class that wasn’t primarily about reproductive rights (really, the only family law issues that don’t directly involve reproduction are the right to marry/divorce, alimony/pre-nuptials, and intimate partner violence, and those topics generally have a lot of overlap with reproductive issues), or a sex equality class that didn’t spend a significant amount of time on reproductive issues. If they don’t, that’s a separate problem that should be addressed.
I would find it much more interesting to look at how many schools did not offer both of those classes. Family law should be available virtually everywhere, but I know that sex equality classes are not as common as you might guess and in my view, that’s a much bigger issue than the lack of specialized reproductive rights courses.
We can’t evade controversial subjects in any context and then act surprised when we can’t reach consensus or compromise.
There is an incredibly high demand for social justice work, there just isn’t money available to create those jobs (that may have been what you were saying, apologies if I misunderstood). Having RJ courses helps to solidify the legitimacy of this area of law and work.
I did mean economically…I mean if you have a $100,000 in law school debt its nearly impossible to take a position than pays around $45,000 per year. My loan load was almost a $1,000 per month when I left law school, so that’s $24,000 a year…just to pay your loans. I know lots of people who came to law school to do social justice work but left with corporate jobs under the crushing reality of the economics of becoming a lawyer. Even I wanted to go directly to an economic justice non-profit or academia but found it wasn’t possible. There aren’t many available jobs and what jobs exist don’t pay above the poverty rate once to take into account the debt a typical law student must take.
[...] Jill at Feministe is talking about reproductive justice and the law, specifically a recent study of reproductive rights courses in American law schools. [...]
Excellent post, especially about how law courses tend to not care about the practical effects of the law.
And I agree with fannie that the problem stems from thinking there is a “neutral” (or “objective”) way to read the law which just so happens to align with the interests of rich, white men. It’s the same thing we saw with Sotomayor, repeated in every class.
I hear ya, but something that bothered me even more was hearing a female medical student talk about how little education they receive in anything related to contraception and abortion in medical school (a public one, not one affiliated with a religious institution).
It makes more sense than you might think: The reason that we study Con Law in general is because the constitution underlies all of our other legal decisions. But still, meeting a 1L who wants to “be a constitutional lawyer” is still a bit laughable unless they’re a straight-A student at a top 10. There are what, maybe 1000 full time constitutional lawyers in the country? If that-it might be half as many.
And that’s the WHOLE constitution. Repro law (which is basically constitutional in nature) is an even more isolated area, where changes tend to come very rarely through extremely major cases, fought by specialized attorneys.
From a practical perspective, the average law student has about as much chance of getting a full time job working on constitutional reproductive law as they do getting a supreme court clerkship: almost nil.
Family law is always well attended. You can make a living there. Same with criminal law, corporate law–nonprofits included–and other things. I don’t know that this represents as much of a “rejection of the practical” as is implied; I think it’s quite the reverse.