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Addressing Anti-Black Racism: School Strategic Priorities

Alignment of School's Strategic Priorities

Faculty Hiring and Retention

The law school was founded in 2008 and matriculated its first batch of students in the Fall of 2009. A core justification for adding a new law school to the University of California system was to develop a legal education that advanced a public interest mission. This kind of mission orientation naturally lent itself to research, teaching, and service commitments that focused on racism. And because racism in the American context has been expressed primarily in terms of anti-Blackness, over the years, the law school has generated a number of ideas germane to the Black experience. 

Currently, our faculty includes four experts on areas of the law central to the Black experience: Mehrsa Baradaran, Michele Goodwin, Kaaryn Gustafson, and L. Song Richardson. 

Other faculty members who have since moved onto other opportunities reflect a longer history of faculty engagement related to the Black experience. The founding faculty included Trina Jones whose work focuses on many different aspects of anti-Black racism and most notably the phenomenon of colorism within the Black community. She has since returned to her home faculty at Duke law school. For nearly a decade, Mario Barnes was a faculty member at the law school. His work focuses on a number of aspects of anti-Black racism including the constitutionality of discriminatory practices and the complicated relationship between racialized distinctions and identity. He left us a couple of years ago to assume the deanship at the University of Washington law school. Most recently, Alexandra Natapoff was a valued member of our faculty. She is a nationally-recognized scholar on criminal law and procedure who recently left UCI to join the faculty at Harvard law school. 

The law school is committed to hiring and retaining faculty who advance the project of inclusive excellence. Since the beginning of Dean Richardson’s tenure, the law school’s Faculty Equity Advisor has participated in the appointments process in an advisory capacity. These advisors have educated both the committee and faculty more broadly on best practices for hiring for inclusive excellence.

Teaching

The law school has also poured significant resources into providing the optimal teaching environment for our faculty and students to pursue difficult questions related to the Black experience, anti-Black racism, and racism more generally. Much of this work has gone towards showing that racism operates beyond intentional bad acts and in fact is most productively understood as a systemic problem that pervades most if not all institutions. 

To help ensure that we are eliminating and mitigating these types of biases within the law school, we have provided continued education and training of faculty and staff including:

• Offering an implicit bias training for faculty and staff conducted by nationally-recognized expert, Professor Rachel Godsil. Dean Richardson continues to conduct implicit bias scholarship and trainings for students, faculty, and the local legal community.
• Increasing Bar Programming with focus on diversity and inclusive excellence (beginning Spring 2020).
• Creating an Ad Hoc Teaching Evaluations Committee to consider whether and how to use teaching evals in light of well-documented bias in that instrument.
• Creating an Inclusiveness in the Classroom Evaluation pilot project.   
• Offering students courses on race and the law and other equity issues. Courses since 2017 include: Race and the Law; Critical Identity Theory; Racial Violence and the Law; Identity, Power & Professional Responsibility; Race, Law & Capitalism

Fall 2020 Related Courses

• COVID-19 and Civil Rights – Professors Mark Rosenbaum, Bob Solomon, Carrie Hempel, Monica Almadani, and Paul Hoffman 
  The fall 2020 semester will consist of a seminar focusing on COVID-19 and its disproportionate impact on Black and Brown communities. We will examine structural racism and its effects on health, wealth, education, employment, housing, and governmental and private benefits.  During the fall 2020 term, we will focus on studying COVID-19 and the legal and policy issues implicated by the pandemic, working jointly to identify areas for reform. Students will produce a report in the fall that can be published and used by advocates to push for particular reforms. Based on that comprehensive research and analysis – which will require students to work with and learn from partners in the community – the spring 2020 term will be clinical in nature, as we move forward, informed by our work during the fall, to institute litigation or a policy initiative.
• Pay Equity Practicum – Professor Trilby Robinson-Dorn 
  Women who work full-time in the United States earn on average 80 cents for every dollar men earn. The gender pay gap is even wider for women of color. This seminar will introduce students to the pervasive problem of gender pay inequality in the United States, including its causes and impacts. The seminar will survey federal and selected state employment laws that mandate equal pay, including new and proposed laws. Students will also critically examine the role and efficacy of litigation, legislation, and other tools for reducing pay inequity.  Each student will complete a paper or project on a related topic.
• Race, Law & Capitalism – Professor Mehrsa Baradaran 
  This course will explore interrelated issues of race, law, and capitalism in American history. We will focus on the U.S. legal apparatus that created and enforced racial exclusions. We will explore federal and local laws and institutions in the United States that maintained a racial order and the continuing effects of those laws. The course will focus particularly on how segregation and discrimination encoded in law affected the U.S. economy and created a racial wealth gap. We will also explore issues related to criminal justice, policing, and race-based political discourse. Students will explore the role of lawyers, courts, legislators, police, and other officials in enforcing a racialized economic and social order.
• Socio Legal Studies Colloquium (for LSC Emphasis Students) – Professor Allison Perlman (School of Humanities); Law School lead is Professor Swethaa Ballakrishnen 
  This SLS colloquium offers law students a chance to engage with empirical research on socio-legal studies by researchers and scholars across the University and discuss its implications for law and legal policy. Topics for this fall 2020 Colloquium include projects on immigration policy and romance, the fundamentals of socio-legal theory, organizational clemency and post treatment desirability for guns. In the spring, research that will be presented in the Colloquium include, among others, projects on gender and global mobility, racial subjugation of Black men in higher education, civil rights in the Latinx community, and inequality projects on LAPD oversight and disability regimes in the global context. 
  
  The Colloquium will meet almost every week for two hours, around the schedule of the Socio-Legal Studies Workshop (which meets 12-1 pm, through the year). In the fall, there is a slightly shorter schedule (and hence, fewer credits) with six speaker presentation classes and two classes without presentations. In the spring, the Colloquium will meet for 13 speaker presentations and two classes without presentations. 
  
  Typically, in the classes with presentations, students will listen to speakers present their projects for the first half of the session, and engage with their thesis, and ask questions as appropriate. In the second half of the session, students will critique and discuss the paper of the week in small group sessions. Discussions will be focused on the research questions, methods used, and the implications for law and policy. In classes without presentations, students will read the assigned readings for the week and the class will discuss and engage with the main frameworks that help in the dissection of law and society research more generally. All students will be expected to read the paper and prepare short comments (1-2 pages) and questions ahead of both speaker and non-speaker classes.

National Protests Against Anti-Black Racism

As national outrage grew in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans, the law school’s faculty and staff began taking actions both to ensure faculty, staff, and student wellness as well as to empower our community to participate in the national conversation in productive ways. 

First, several faculty and administrators reached out to members of the Black Law Students Association whose members undoubtedly felt the stress and pain of this time most acutely. This list includes the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence, Dean Richardson, Professor Kaaryn Gustafson, and Professor Michele Goodwin.

Second, the school created opportunities for the community to come together to address questions and concerns related to the protests. The law school held individual town halls for staff, faculty, current students, alumni, and incoming students with Dean Richardson.

Third, law school programming was reoriented to meet the needs of this moment. This included the following:

• Scheduling Legal Observer Trainings in conjunction with National Lawyers Guild (NLG).

• Organizing several events through the Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEAR) such as ‘Yonder they do not love your flesh’: Mourning, Anti-Blackness, and Claiming All of Us. CLEAR also has students who serve as fellows. These fellows sent a statement to the law school community. 

• Finding pro bono student opportunities related to the representation of protesters and police misconduct under the leadership of the pro bono director. 

• Reorienting law school intellectual life by inviting speakers for the upcoming school year who focus specifically on anti-Black racism through the workshop series curated by the Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development Stephen Lee. The Associate Dean also committed to creating funding opportunities for faculty and students interested in traveling for reasons related to this issue. 

These structural responses bolster on-going efforts within the law school that address racism more generally. 

Intellectual Life 

A significant strain of our intellectual life focuses on the relationship between race and the law. Our center, CLEAR, has played a central part of this project through its “Perspectives Reading Group,” which facilitates discussions on books that relate to this topic. CLEAR also has sponsored or co-sponsored symposia (like the American Monument Think Tank Marathon (2020) and Race, Inequality, and Debt (2018)) and film screenings that support a robust set of offerings in our intellectual life on the topic of race. A number of faculty and administrators have also organized workshops on microaggressions and creating inclusive classroom environments.

Administration

Several positions within the law school help advance equity principles in school operations. This includes the Equity Advisor (faculty); Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence, and the Executive Director of Community Programs (for pre-law outreach programs). The Dean and Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence have regular meetings with affinity group leaders.

Orientation programming 

For LL.M. Orientation, we hold cultural competency workshops and CQ (Cultural Intelligence Assessment) completed by LL.M. administrators, students, and Global Fellows. For 1L Orientation, our programming includes a presentation by the Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Cultural Competency Training, and 1L Common Book Read (this year it will be Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson).  Our Pre-Orientation programs are designed to level the playing field before 1L year begins

Faculty Service

Our faculty continue to provide service in ways that advance projects related to anti-Black racism. This includes: 

• Professor Kaaryn Gustafson who sits on the campus committee for Race and Policing 
• Professor Trilby Robinson-Dorn and Professor Jane Stoever have served on the campus-wide Council on Equity and Inclusion
• Professor Katie Tinto who is the president-elect for the Public Safety Advisory Committee
• Vice Dean Christopher Whytock and Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and Inclusive Excellence Jennah Jones completed the 2020 Undoing Racism Workshop

Library 

The library has devoted considerable resources to supporting faculty who pursue projects related to the Black experience. This includes: 

• Collections 
  The library purchased copies of books from reading groups (like CLEAR) and visitors and prominently promoted them in library displays. It continues to prioritize purchasing material in subjects where books that treat racism tend to be classified: constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, public interest, legal practice, legal history etc. The library’s collection development policy ensures this ongoing support and states we "support the research, scholarship, teaching, and service endeavors of the Law School." The library has devoted considerable resources to supplement UCI's already substantial archival collections that document the history of racism and the fight against it in the US, and recently participated in creating an e-book collection of on-topic books for the UCI Libraries available to everyone in the UCI community. 
• Other Media 
  The library has also made available movies with public performance rights, e.g. coordinating with Assistant Dean Jennah Jones on the 2017 BLSA film fest to buy everything that was available to buy. 
• Self-Study 
  The law school periodically engages in self-study. When it does so, the library has been instrumental in compiling and cataloguing relevant materials including a list of racism books authored by faculty for the Communications department; a list of all racism/discrimination publications authored by faculty; and setting up multiple alerts for CLEAR about racial disparities with COVID-19. All of this is in addition to supporting faculty research on all related topics. 

Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

The law school also has a committee dedicated to ensuring that all operational aspects of the law school comply with and advance goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion. 

• Report
  The committee has compiled and generated a Final Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Inclusion and Diversity, October 13, 2016. This self-study assess whether and to what extent the law school was meeting our equity-related goals.
• Workshops
  In addition, this committee has organized several of workshops including those focused on microaggressions and inclusive pedagogy. It has also created an Online Portal for faculty, students and staff to provide information on their experiences with diversity and inclusion during the Spring 2016 and also set up office hours during this period. Finally, it has worked with students observing Ramadan during finals, Spring 2020, and addressed student equity issues related to COVID 19-related emergency move to online teaching in March 2019.