CFP: SALT-LatCrit-ClassCrit Conference

This just in:

2022 SALT Teaching Conference, in partnership with the LatCrit-SALT-ClassCrits Junior Faculty Development Workshop 

Rest & Resistance:
Preserving Our Democracy while Protecting Our Peace

Friday and Saturday, October 14 -15, 2022 
Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Chicago, Illinois 

Society has experienced so much in the last two years—a global health pandemic, ongoing attacks against Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and other marginalized communities, and deterioration of our democracy and constitutional rights. To overcome these challenges, we must reinforce the pillars of Rest & Resistance as bedrock to the fight for justice. The 2022 SALT Teaching Conference will provide an opportunity for academics and activists to explore these pillars as a framework for self-care and social justice, with the strategies, support, and resources necessary for faculty, students, and lawyers to rest and resist within a culture of systemic injustice.

Resistance: As progressive legal educators, we are charged with teaching the law, not just as it is, but also as it should be. Yet we confront this charge at a time when members of the government and judiciary are eroding the law to advance their own interests at the expense of justice—racial justice, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, environmental justice, and more. How do we teach “law” in this climate while resisting injustice and helping our students and communities to envision what the law can and should be for all?

Rest: A recurring tactic of oppression is to overwhelm and exhaust resistance, so that injustice is normalized. By contrast, justice thrives with tenderness and empathy, even in resistance. To prepare lawyers to sustain this resistance, we must guide them in how to sustain themselves and each other for this work with self-care of mind, body, family, and community. And to guide others, we must start with ourselves. How should principles of rest be incorporated into legal education as a systemic foundation to resistance?

This conference will provide participants with diverse opportunities to engage in broad, substantive, and supportive discussions about these twin pillars of rest and resistance for confronting injustice. Presentation topics could include, but are not limited to: 

• Techniques toincorporate historical and theoretical perspectives into the law school curriculum as a tool to strengthen student critical thinking about the role of law and social justice advocacy. 

• Innovative methods toteach mindful lawyering in legal education and tools to support law students and new lawyers in developing self-care and balance in legal practice.

• Proposalsfor cultivating community-lawyering efforts between law schools and social justice groups as a pedagogical priority.

• Interprofessional approaches tosocial justice advocacy. 

• Best practices todisrupt racist and ableist constructs of legal education to support students and faculty with diverse learning methods.

We welcome related topics and encourage a variety of session formats. Please be advised that proposals may be combined where appropriate. 
 

Submit your proposals via google form by 11:59pm Pacific Time on July 8, 2022. 

Members of the SALT Teaching Conference Committee include: Brooks Holland, Conference Chair (Gonzaga), Tiffany Atkins (Elon), Natalie Chin (CUNY), Margaret Hahn-Dupont (Northeastern), Hugh Mundy (University of Illinois Chicago), Steven Ramirez (Loyola Chicago), James Wilets (Nova Southeastern), and Danielle Wingfield-Smith (Richmond). Please share information about the Teaching Conference with your colleagues, particularly new and junior faculty, who are not yet members of SALT.  Visit www.saltlaw.org for additional details.

The LatCrit, Inc./SALT/ClassCrits Junior Faculty Development Workshop (FDW) will take place on October 13, 2022, immediately preceding the SALT Teaching Conference.  The FDW is designed for critical, progressive, and social justice oriented pre-tenure professors, including clinicians and legal writing professors, as well as those who may be contemplating a career in law teaching.  The FDW is designed to familiarize junior faculty with LatCrit, SALT, and ClassCrits principles and values and support them in the scholarship, teaching, and service aspects of professional success.

Comments

[Anonymous Bosch]

If y'all get together to regurgitate the Indeterminacy thesis and Critique of Rights (even with CRT's quasi/pseudo-backlash against the latter) to one another, repeating the mantra that they create spaces to advance your (partisan) politics at every turn, then how are you the DEFENDERS of the rule of law (a mere ideology, as Tushnet's latest piece reminds us), constitutional rights, and a democratic form of government (a rule-constituted-and-governed set of institutions) rather than their rapists?

If the law is simply, and always, a vehicle to advance your policy preference of the moment, then why should people who don't share your beliefs ever trust you, live in community with you, respect what you say, or even abide by the rule of law vis-a-vis you? Your real aim is simply subversion, after all.

If you are indeed "charged" with teaching the law, in whichever way you claim, why isn't that duty itself indeterminate?

Will the undemocratic and reactionary quality of SCOTUS be remedied simply by packing it with partisans of your liking? Will that render it more democratic, somehow?

"A recurring tactic of oppression is to overwhelm and exhaust resistance..." Indeed, it's quite clear what the corporate media, Hollywood, and university administrations are doing. DEI uber alles.

[Anonymous Bosch]

"Best practices to disrupt racist and ableist constructs of legal education..."

STEP 1: Dismantle and disavow your own theories. Their ideology and conceptual apparatuses clearly utilize and advance racist stereotypes. (I don't mean that hyperbolically or rhetorically. It would even be funny were it not so obnoxious, hypocritical, and disingenuous.) Crit legal theory warrants a thorough series of "deconstructions" and intellectual spankings.