Teaching Law Reform in the 1990s

Abstract

Advocates for social change, including lawyers and law professors, explicitly inquire into the relationship between theory and practice in law reform efforts. Theory is intentionally used to develop novel legal principles and procedures in an attempt to produce just results. The study of lawyering for social change offers law students an angle other than that of traditional legal education on what they are learning in law school and on lawyering choices. How lawyers design strategies to attempt to bring about social change, how they determine what is good policy, how they develop theories about the appropriate relationship between lawyers and their communities, and how the legal system resists effective social change are important and intriguing inquiries.This article discusses a seminar entitled "Law and Social Reform." This seminar gives students a forum in which to consider the types of change that hey think are desirable, to propose change and strategies for securing it, and to evaluate the effectiveness of a reform effort. After studying law reform efforts from an historical perspective, participants focus on and present their own proposals for law reform. While collaborating with advocates in the community working on the chosen topic, each student writes a paper on a reform idea and the strategy necessary for its attainment. Each participant's paper is carefully supervised in preparation for classroom presentation.