Teaching Resource Worth Checking Out: Guerrilla Guides to Law Teaching

 
A new online resource for law teachers seeking to make their teaching more responsive to current social justice movements, called the Guerrilla Guides to Law Teaching, is now available and worth checking out. Amna Akbar, Sameer Ashar, Bill Quigley, and Jocelyn Simonson authored the Guides.  In their current form, the Guides set forth four principles for law teaching, and also contain sections tailored to Criminal Law and Clinical Teaching (two courses taught by a number of blog readers).

According to the authors, “The Guerrilla Guides to Law Teaching are a collective effort to acknowledge and confront our present “movement moment” within our classrooms. We embrace this moment as an important opportunity to revisit methods and sources of teaching in the legal academy, and to generate creative approaches that break us out of traditional modes of thinking.  We approach this project with a sense of urgency given that many of the movements of the day –the Movement for Black Lives, #Not1More, #IdleNoMore, #Fightfor15, Occupy– have at the center of their critique our system of laws.  And that those critiques represent long-standing concerns in communities of color and poor communities about law’s violence and inequality.  These critiques about law are important, they deserve our attention and scrutiny.  They can no longer remain at the periphery of law teaching.  We think that critical understanding of how law is enforced–or not–and how legal systems operate differently for differently situated people advances and motivates law student acquisition of essential legal concepts across fields of study and practice.”

The Guides’ Four Principles are as follows:

“1. Building Solidarities. Collaborate & talk with each other, our students, impacted communities, & organizers about meeting this moment with creativity, community, & an open heart.

2. Advancing Resistance. Bring lived experiences, the material conditions under which people live, & histories of collective resistance of marginalized people into the classroom.

3.Broadening & Deepening Discourse.  Name the Politics of Law & Expand the range of discourse in the classroom to include radical & left politics, & the imaginations & critiques of  marginalized communities.  

4. Radical Interventions. Embolden law teachers to teach, talk, & practice law & lawyering differently.”

-JKoh