In the 2021-22 school year, RWU Law co-sponsored, along with the City University of New York School of Law and Jurist, an ongoing Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series.

Eliminating the terms “race and ethnicity” from the American Bar Association’s law school accreditation rules will hobble longstanding efforts to bring in diverse students and faculty, critics warned in public comments on the proposal.

"Subverting the narrative that the legal profession must be austere and controlled, this prescient how to guide addresses the crucial need for holistic, trauma-centred law teaching. It advocates for a healthier, more inclusive profession by identifying strategies to engage, and even encourage, emotions within legal education."-- Publisher's website.

Women lawyers still lag behind their male counterparts in leadership positions, according to Law360 Pulse's 2024 Women in Law Report.

Wisconsin is home to 12 tribal nations, each with its own unique history, culture, and government. As sovereign entities, these nations have the inherent right to create, enforce, and adjudicate laws to protect and enhance …

"This book offers an international breadth of historical and theoretical insights into recent efforts to 'decolonise' legal education across the world. With a specific focus on post/decolonial thought and anti-racist methods in pedagogy, this edited collection provides an accessible illustration of pedagogical innovation in teaching and learning law. Chapters cover civil and common law legal systems, incorporate cases from non-state Indigenous legal systems, and critically examine key topics such as decolonization and anti-racism in criminology, colonialism and the British Empire, and court process and indigenous justice. The book demonstrates how teaching can be modified and adapted to address long-standing injustice in the curriculum. Offering a systematic collection of theorical and practical examples of antiracist and decolonial legal pedagogy, this volume will appeal to curriculum designers and law educators as well as at undergraduate and post-graduate law level teaching and research"--

Trauma-Informed Law According to the authors of Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyers Resilience and Healing,  “a key concept for trauma-informed lawyering is the shift that has occurred, …

"This book is a collection of voices that persist in a profession that still lags behind in hearing them. We share these stories because the profession is enriched by the stories and the lawyers who tell them. This book is a form of virtual mentoring to build up the next generation of woman advocates so that they, too, may add their stories. In this book, we provide information about the status of women in the legal profession, and stories about identifying and overcoming bias and the hidden hazards in the practice of law, for men and women, while addressing the business of law. The stories in this book then go on to explain the value of being true to ourselves, establishing unique career paths, and finding guideposts and beacons to help enlighten us along the way to success"--

Lloyd Lionel Gaines applied to the University of Missouri School of Law in 1936. Despite an outstanding scholastic record, Gaines was denied admission based solely on the grounds that Missouri’s Constitution called for “separate education of the races.” Because Missouri had no public law school that admitted Black applications, state law required the state to pay Gaines’ tuition at public universities in Iowa, Kansas or Nebraska. Attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) identified Gaines’ case as a good vehicle to begin the incremental process of challenging the ignominious precedent of “separate but equal” established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Together, they sued the University of Missouri seeking an order granting him admission to its Law School.

"Homeless Advocacy examines the role legal advocacy plays in preventing and ending homelessness. The book provides a history of homelessness, the current state of it in the United States, context on working with unhoused populations, and analyzes the legal issues they face through a practitioner's lens. With these topics, ranging from criminalization of homelessness to employment barriers and affordable housing, the author provides a resource that will encourage and enable more people to advocate on behalf of unhoused populations and will serve as a guidepost to advance that advocacy. There are many books on poverty, but this book is different and complementary as it focuses on the unhoused population and the legal challenges unique to them. It is aimed at law students, policy, and social work students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and individual activists. It includes narratives from practitioners and those with lived experience of being unhoused"--

Investigating matters of human rights at home and abroad. Listen to the podcast by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, hosted by Executive Director Sushma Raman.

The topical research guides listed here are designed to provide students in specific Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law courses with resources and tools to begin their course-related research. The guides provide information on print and electronic library resources, legal databases, interdisciplinary databases, current awareness resources, and web resources. The reference librarians at the Ross-Blakley Law Library encourage all students engaging in research projects to meet with a librarian to discuss their research. College of Law students can request an appointment to meet with a librarian here.

Welcome to Digging a Hole, where Sam Moyn and David Schleicher interview legal scholars and dig into the debates heard inside law school halls.

Wisconsin Law in Action is a monthly podcast featuring new or forthcoming scholarship from the UW Law School Faculty, exploring a variety of legal topics and examining new developments in the legal academic field.

Three law schools have managed to comply with the American Bar Association’s (ABA) accreditation standard requiring a two-year bar passage rate of at least 75%. The ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recently announced that Ave Maria School of Law, the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School […]

Slavery and the University of Virginia School of Law is a project of the UVA Law Library that examines UVA Law’s historical connections to the institution of slavery through people, places, and pedagogy. From UVA's Academical Village, legal education in the antebellum period played out within a landscape of enslavement. In the classroom, faculty lectured on slavery as a social good. Law student notebooks, digitized and available on this site, enable this new research into the inclusion of slavery in UVA’s antebellum legal curriculum.

February is Black History Month, and the Muse Law Library is proud to present our celebration of Black achievement in the law. Here you will find the full collection of the 47 slides exhibited throughout the Library this month, each one documenting a different Black trailblazer or icon. The people featured here all displayed resounding courage and perseverance as they struggled against injustices and abuses at the hands of an oppressive, bigoted system. You will find lawyers and judges, writers and artists, and civil rights activists all connected by the common thread of a dedication to racial justice.

Books, movies, podcasts, music, and game suggestions from your favorite law faculty. “Dead Sea newspaper” by inju is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Hello everyone.  It has become a Georg…

"Standard legal ethics courses long considered dry and theoretical by many students have experienced a renaissance over the past two years due to the pandemic and an increased focus on social justice."

Compiled resources from Harvard Law Review.

"Race Racism And The Law considers race racism and racial distinctions in the law. It examines the role of domestic and international law in promoting and/or alleviating racism. This website makes law review scholarship (and related material) more accessible to community activists students and non-legal faculty."

"Frequently when women's issues are discussed researched and/or analyzed they do not always take into account additional and separate issues that may be faced by women of color. When it was learned that then-ABA president Hilarie Bass would have as one of her primary initiatives a study and research based on the long-term careers of women in law it occurred to us that the experiences of women of color could be different. After all we could within minutes identify approximately 90 percent of the women of color practicing in firms more than 30 years. This is not a good thing."

"In June 1951 five African Americans Harvey E. Beech James L. Lassiter J. Kenneth Lee Floyd B. McKissick and James R. Walker enrolled in classes at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill ("Carolina Law")."

"The trope of the strong Black woman is not only false it's dangerous. Black women more than anyone need to practice self-care."

"A lawyer's cultural competence goes beyond avoiding bias. To serve diverse clients lawyers should have special communication and interpersonal skills. Those skills can be taught and learned."

"American jurisprudence and law have profoundly shaped defined and constrained the lives of Black people for over 400 years. Racial inequality has extremely deep roots in American society and our Constitution statutes court cases and regulations not only bear witness to this but are often the source of it. This timeline provides an overview of some of these laws beginning with the first known case marking the legal difference between Africans and Europeans in 1640 in Virginia and continuing with laws recently introduced in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans. While not exhaustive the timeline focuses on a number of key legal events and actions that have structured and systematized racism in America."

"Law schools would have to train students in bias racism and crosscultural competency under a proposal before the American Bar Association's policymaking body this month."

"Law Schools and Bar associations are sharing some excellent stories as part of black history month."