Law Schools

Legal Education Takes On Changemaking And Social Entrepreneurship

University of San Diego School of Law hosted Ashoka event where model changemaking course syllabus was developed.

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Lawyers have not typically been seen as leading the way when it comes to social entrepreneurship or changemaking, but work is underway to change that, including at the law school level.

A “Law and Social Innovation” event held at the University of San Diego School of Law earlier this semester was one example of such efforts. The daylong affair served as a pre-day for the annual Ashoka U Exchange conference.

One session of the festivities at USD had participants craft a model law school course syllabus for teaching aspiring lawyers how to become changemakers or support those engaging in social entrepreneurship.

Dan Jackson, executive director of the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law, began the design-thinking exercise by having the participants brainstorm the knowledge and skills that lawyers who want to be changemakers should possess.

For skills/expertise, the group’s list featured resilience, cultural competency, project management, compassion, and legislative advocacy, among many others.

As for topics one should have knowledge about in this domain, the participants’ list included nonprofits, international development, organizing, administrative law, and public interest law.

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Jackson then split those present into several groups to develop various modules for the course syllabus. The groups were not only tasked with generating overarching themes for the modules, but also with suggesting case studies, articles, and even podcasts that would enhance student learning.

The five modules ultimately put forward were: Reframing Lawyering; Changemaking Skills; The Law as a Change Tool; The Business of Changemaking; and Financing Changemaking.

The Reframing Lawyering module would feature a class focused on guiding principles and core values, and another session on leadership. Laura van Dernoot Lipsky’s “Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others” was one of the associated readings.

Meanwhile, the Business of Changemaking module would examine entity formation, marketing, and protection of intellectual property, among other topics.

“I was remarkably surprised by how much progress we made,” Jackson said.

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Bridget Gramme, administrative director of the Center for Public Interest Law at USD School of Law, also was impressed with the group’s discussion and work product.

“I just think it’s great that we are thinking about legal education from an innovative perspective,” said Gramme, who led the planning of the event.

She said helping law students hone different soft skills will be particularly important amid the emergence of artificial intelligence tools that can perform tasks associates and other lawyers have typically handled.

“So I think this type of syllabus and the things that we are discussing from a changemaker’s perspective are really helping to develop the next generation of lawyers and the skills they are going to really need,” Gramme said.

Jackson said he plans to lead the same design-thinking workshop in June at a conference co-organized by NYU School of Law’s Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship. He will then merge the previous and new brainstorming efforts together into a final product by the end of the summer.

Jackson expects to share the final model syllabus through the Ashoka network and with other law schools, which he said he hopes will generate more teaching in this realm “in a way that uniquely embraces the Ashoka mindset of interdisciplinary changemaking.”

Lyle Moran is a freelance writer in San Diego who handles both journalism and content writing projects. He previously reported for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, San Diego Daily Transcript, Associated Press, and Lowell Sun. He can be reached at lmoransun@gmail.com and found on Twitter @lylemoran.

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