Queering Legal Education: A Project of Theoretical Discovery

Abstract:     
The article has two parts. Part II discusses the materials we reviewed to inform the development of a queer legal pedagogy. In particular, it examines the categories of queer legal scholarship and highlights the contributions of other outsider scholars to legal education debates. Early in our research, we found limited material on queer legal pedagogy, and we discovered nothing that posited a theoretical approach. We did, however, find rich resources written by other outsiders to law from which some design principles for queer legal pedagogy might be drawn. We should note at the outset that our goal in this Part of the Article is not to review queer scholarship or outsider approaches to legal pedagogy exhaustively, nor is it to provide a literature review. Instead, our purpose is simply to acknowledge the contributions of these scholars to our understanding of what queer legal pedagogy might be by highlighting some of the fundamental insights in that scholarship.

Part III of the Article proposes eight principles of queer legal pedagogy. Although we conclude that it is premature to suggest an overarching theoretical approach to this pedagogy, we present these eight principles to begin a discussion of what a queer legal pedagogy might look like. We also attempt to apply these principles to the law school curriculum, making some preliminary remarks about how the curriculum might be queered. Finally, the Article concludes with some tentative thoughts about the transformative power of queer legal pedagogy.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 38

Keywords: legal education, queer, feminist

Accepted Paper Series