Boston University School of Law

I came to law school on purpose, recognizing that law organizes and reorganizes society, determining who are the winners and losers and perhaps whether there will be losers. For better or worse, my reception of what I learn in class defaults to a slow-to-trust critique of how legal norms favor powerful actors, with occasional internal applause for a promising flare of fairness. Recently, I’ve realized that I’m making extra work for myself because it would be more efficient to just accept the rules as they come and apply them with cold calculation to exams.

I’ve heard that performance in class doesn’t reflect performance on exams exactly because the student engaging in passionate policy debate is caught up in meta-analysis while other students are quietly internalizing end-of-the-day rules. (Be that as it may, I’m not good at being quiet.) There’s always a bigger picture, yet I came to law school to translate big picture concerns into concrete on-the-ground action. Getting lost in the big picture with good intentions and for good reasons could be called CLS syndrome, where a critique of power becomes the end point and the ideas have a hard time trickling down into new, fair ways of doing things.

If there’s one case that I can remember growing up with as a beacon of fairness, it has to be Brown v. Board of Education, and at last it came up in Constitutional Law. The written opinion falls short of the myth, with Professor Baxter noting that a unanimous decision from all nine Justices was likely secured by generalized language that staved off dissents. The language was indirect enough to usher in a decade of relative silence from the Supreme Court while some lower courts chose to construe the opinion as narrowly as possible to except their local segregation programs as part of a larger political resistance—captured in, for example, the Southern Manifesto.

Here come the big picture concerns: it feels short-sighted not to jump from integrating schools to larger questions of race, and from questions of race to larger questions of self-determination reserved for powerful actors. We’re back in CLS territory, and how can we not be? To what extent must valid raw emotions be intellectualized for presentation to avoid being overlooked?

Emotional engagement with law is hard to place because law aspires to be above emotional bias, yet even that aspiration may point to an unanticipated bias once the legal conversation seeks to include those who have at times been smothered by it. Blacks have been told what their associations will be—now we’ll segregate you, now we’ll integrate you, at our pace—while subject to pressure for solutions as an unindividuated mass, in a society where individuality is generally treasured. After I suppress an angry outburst and look away from my casebook for a few minutes to let the sadness register, I convince myself to turn back to the material and stomach it. But I cannot learn neutrally, above emotions. Strangely, I wouldn’t want to if I could because I would lose the part of me that is sensitive to authorized indignity.

Law is becoming more fair, slowly and in bursts, but I don’t think I’m alone among students in my gut responses to what law has looked like. Thankfully, I can point to comments from each professor I’ve had which demonstrate experienced sensitivity to these issues. I’m proud, too, to be at a law school increasingly recognized for encouraging public service as a central component of career preparation, sharing the ethic that a lawyer’s institutional access can be leveraged on behalf of those who don’t have the same.