Neither Here nor There: Of the Female in American Legal Education |
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| Authors: | L Amede Obiora |
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| Institution: | L. Amede Obiora;has been a professor of law at a number of U. S. law schools. This article is dedicated to Trina Grillo and Inem Odiso. The author would like to thank Lawrence Friedman, Paul Brest, John Ogpu, members of the Northeast Corridor Law Teachers'Collective, and a company of friends and colleagues for their constructive criticisms. She also acknowledges the research assistance of Beverly Bryant, Scott Stewart, Jan Michelson, and Derek Burrell. Finally, she is indebted to Jesus for grace and to her family and friends for support and inspiration. |
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| Abstract: | In this Critical Review Essay, Professor Obiora brings together work from many traditions to address the issue of how differences among students beyond gender–and, in particular, differences in terms of race–might affect legal education. After situating the question in terms of the literature on legal education generally (including standard critiques), she delves into work on gender–in law generally, in kgal education, in moral development and learning, in language use, and in education generally–to elucidate hypothesized differences between men and women that might affect differential experience in law school. She then moves on to make the picture more complex by drawing on work that indicates cross-cultural and class-based variation around conceptions of gender. Using research by sociolinguists on educational processes and work by historians and feminists of color on the intersection of gender, race, and class, Professor Obiora suggests specific ways in which women of color and working-class women might diverge from middle-class white women in their approach to kgal education. In particular, she notes: (1) different speech patterns and linguistic socialization lend different meaning to “voice,”“silence,” and “interruption” in classroom interactions; (2) the historical distinction between public and private spheres has been much more sharply drawn for upper-middle-class white women than it has been for black and working-class women; (3) the exclusion of black women from male “chivalry” and feminine idealization necessitated the development of agency; black women could not afford to be passive. Given these points of divergence, but also given convergences among the experiences of women, Obiora suggests a complex and contextually sensitive approach to the issue of gender in legal education, one that takes seriously the differences that exist among women. Because of the richness of the literature reviewed here, we include a Bibliography at the end of the article. |
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