New Series, Vol. 2, No. 4
The author, a law professor in the University of Arizona law school and University of Utah business school, argues that ultimately US law schools should be abolished because they are not reformable as “unique systems of socialization that advance harm in service of the USA as a settler nation-state.” They argue that law schools cause pedagogical harm because of their imperial curriculum, structural harm because of their gatekeeping of legal knowledge, and ideological harm in their training of lawyers as agents of settler-state power. Author Antonio M. Coronado writes that they are motivated to engage in this work as a “genderqueer, disabled, mentally ill, and Xicanx legal educator-storyteller.”
The first US law school was established in 1779 at the College of William & Mary, with the “case method” of teaching introduced in 1870 at Harvard. The case method enforced the English law system for respect for precedent, and Coronado writes that cases were selected for discussion that aligned with the country’s dominant values. Courses in topics such as corporate law, trusts and estates, secured transactions (contracts), and others facilitated law schools graduating who Coronado calls “racial capitalists.” They write that law school curricula do not align with the “lived realities of communities with legal need.”
Coronado writes that structural harms are clear. First, state bans on non-lawyers practicing law serve as a form of “mythmaking,” such that, “legal information has been/is crafted to be incomprehensible to the public and exclusive to legal professionals.” Moreover, consumer protection rhetoric warns against “runaway” untrained legal advisors. Second, the US legal profession in 2022 was still 79% white, with 52% of 2022 law school graduates working for for-profit firms and only 8.4% practicing public interest law. The 2023 mean average starting salary at firms was $200,000. Coronado characterizes law schools as perpetuating “manufactured prestige, power, and privilege,” and the law as a ”distinct language of power.” They point out that subscription-based legal databases (Lexis Nexis, Bloomberg Law, Thomson Reuters) each cost $85 to $500 per month. (The article omits free public availability of law libraries in US county courthouses.)
On ideological harms, Coronado starts with law schools not teaching US legal history. As they write, “how can educators effectively and truthfully teach cases concerning settler notions of property without first naming chattel enslavement and colonial land occupation? Or that U.S. criminal law has long been premised on whatever white supremacy has deemed undesirable?” Second, they point out “legal prophecy,” the assumption that individual judges, lawyers, and law students are competent and empowered to determine the law and its meaning. Connected with this is Coronado’s argument that law students tend to think of law as “all rules or all power” and that they are qualified to objectively deploy them.
Later in the article, Coronado goes into much more detail about legal history, particularly lawyers and law schools. For example, after the Civil War, the couple dozen law schools marketed themselves to future lawyers, but also future corporate executives and heirs of family fortunes. The American Bar Association was concerned by the mid-1800s about the “quality” of immigrant and “mixed-race” law school applicants. Flash forward 100 years, and the FBI was spying on persons taking a state bar exam who were affiliated with the leftwing National Lawyers Guild.
Short of abolishing U.S. law schools, Coronado and others elsewhere argue for “radical reforms”: “(1) shrink the formal law school, as the system doing harm; (2) rely on modes of political, economic, and social organization that contradict prevailing arrangements and gesture at new possibilities; (3) build and shift legal power into the hands of those directly impacted, who are often Black, brown, working class, and poor; (4) acknowledge and repair the past harm of U.S. legal education; and (5) improve, or at least not harm, the material conditions of directly impacted people with regard to legal knowledge and information.”
For the first and second reforms, they suggest “community-based justice workers,” and also for the first: reducing the number of law schools, eliminating the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and bar exams, and law schools including race-conscious pedagogies. For the third reform, Coronado suggests that all Americans receive basic legal education. For the fourth reform, they suggest honest, complete education in legal history as well as the cooperation of numerous disciplines in reforming legal education. For the fifth reform, Coronado suggests “(1) expanding as many non-harmful pathways to legal power as possible while (2) reorienting the prevailing purpose of U.S. legal education.”
Communication Currents Discussion Questions
- All professional education socializes students for various professions and/or industries. Compare and contrast Coronado’s view of law schools with the possible pedagogical, structural, ideological and/or other harms of training in schools of business, architecture, education, journalism, agriculture, and/or others.
- Coronado’s starting point is that terms, styles, structures, etc., of legal communication collectively constitute a unique type of rhetoric. Is that also true in fields such as business or education? Why or why not?
- Focusing on law schools as sites of oppressive rhetoric that should be eliminated, Coronado minimizes law schools as teaching extensive, practical knowledge and skills, suggesting that average citizens could counsel each other on law. What do you think about that and why?
For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Antonio M. Coronado is professor of practice & community legal education lead, Innovation for Justice, James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona, and David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah.
This essay, by Dane S. Claussen, translates the scholarly journal article, “Pedagogy of the oppressive: Building the movement to abolish U.S. legal education,” by Antonio M. Coronado, Quarterly Journal of Speech 110(4), pp. 603-623, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2024.2396619
The full copyright and private policy link is available at natcom.org/privacy-policy/
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