'Woke Curriculum' Based On Actual Supreme Court Cases Terrifies Conservatives

Georgetown Law incorporating race into legal discussions prompting conservative freak-out.

Man in bed with nervous lookIf you’re not scared yet, then just check out this new article about Georgetown Law and you’ll be… well, still not scared but at least you’ll have a good laugh.

The Washington Free Beacon’s latest legal education story is titled, “‘Scary for the Legal Profession’: Georgetown Upends Traditional Law School Lessons in New Woke Curriculum.” It certainly jams all the usual right-wing freak-out buzzwords in there.

But from the opening line, it’s not off to a great start.

At most law schools, the first few weeks of property law are spent on foundational cases of British common law.

Wh-what?

Not sure that opening sentence could be summed up better than, “Tell me you didn’t go to law school without telling me you didn’t go to law school.” Like most law students from this millennium, I’m not sure British law ever came up in any law school course except for R v Dudley and Stephens, and I suspect that only made it in because my professor enjoyed watching us talk about cannibalism for an hour.

But the Free Beacon thrives on these exercises in textual hyperventilation about the decline and fall of America’s law schools. A couple weeks ago, Bari Weiss referred to the WFB’s Aaron Sibarium, who wrote this piece on Georgetown and is very much not a lawyer, as “consistently been ahead of the pack on this beat,” which is true from the perspective of the football analogy of “outkicking the coverage of reality.”

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Our intrepid non-lawyer carries on, introducing us to Georgetown’s first-year property curriculum that eschews reading cases from the middle ages in another country and instead property class students…

learn on day one that the history of American property law is “the history of dispossession and appropriation,” according to videos of the course reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Lecture slides from the first month of coursework trace the “birth” of modern property law not to English courts, but to “Native dispossession and the enslavement of African Americans.” “Possession,” one slide asserts, “is a legal term of art for a settler capitalist society.”

Padme

“We need to stop with all this colonialism talk and get back to the British” is a hard sell under any circumstance, but for the uniquely American property experience dictated by Supreme Court cases like Johnson v. M’Intosh and Dred Scott, it’s a hell of an ask that professors kindly avoid discussing indigenous peoples or slavery. Part of the whole “British common law” that the author doesn’t really understand is that all these decisions are built upon the past, making these issues kind of a big deal.

For example, her slides explain, “Intellectual Property has a cultural appropriation problem,” especially when it comes to black choreographers: Their dance moves were allegedly appropriated by the popular video game Fortnite, and by white influencers on TikTok.

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Except this is… true? Intellectual property has pervasive race issues with minority creators consistently downplayed as unworthy of the legal protection designed for “real” ingenuity.

Also, how is this not the height of practical legal education? Any lawyer entering the intellectual property space should be aware that counseling creators of color presents a potentially lucrative practice area. Or at least they should know that their corporate clients are going to be fending off those claims.

“The number of minutes spent in a classroom is finite,” said Josh Blackman, who has taught property at South Texas College of Law for a decade. “As professors spend more time discussing other ancillary issues, less time will be spent on foundational issues that lawyers need to know about to practice law.”

I hope that’s a typo. In any event, this comment comes from a law school that actually got sued because it couldn’t figure out basic intellectual property concepts so maybe we don’t take any advice from them on this subject.

That’s the thing about the whole jeremiad, the “woke” curriculum described is consistently better tailored to what a practicing lawyer needs to understand than reading Blackstone’s Commentaries would. Which is more likely to come up in 2022? Litigating over fox hunts or who gets royalties when Marvin Gaye’s music gets ripped off?

In February 2021, the University of Southern California announced that all incoming J.D. candidates would be required to take “Race, Racism, and the Law,” citing the “racial reckoning of 2020.”

These people want to talk about racism less than Madrigals want to talk about Bruno.

Is the theory that 2020 didn’t reveal that race plays a role in criminal procedure? To buy into the moral panic of the article requires pretending that law students will never have a case — criminal or civil, on either side of the table — where race might come up. That’s not just naive for 2022 — the O.J. trial happened so long ago that Ryan Murphy’s dramatization of it is now old.

An alum of Sunder’s class echoed that worry. “We spent so much time on theory that we rushed through important concepts really quickly,” the third year student recalled. “Some of them are definitely on the bar.”

Like the rule against perpetuities? What’s the important concept that got glossed over because the class talked about Supreme Court precedents?

The reason BARBRI and Themis and Kaplan all exist is that bar exams don’t test any of the stuff learned in law school. Law school teaches students to think like lawyers, the bar exam teaches them to repeat laws from memory. Lawyers really need to be held to a higher standard when misleading the public about how the law works because it’s stuff like this that erodes public confidence in the profession unnecessarily.

A couple weeks ago, the problem was woke students complaining about a speaker from an SPLC designated hate group when they should sit quietly and just listen to both sides. Now it’s “scary” that students have to hear that… discrimination cases exist?

If they can’t handle that, how are they going to handle being a real lawyer?

‘Scary for the Legal Profession’: Georgetown Upends Traditional Law School Lessons in New Woke Curriculum [Washington Free Beacon]

Earlier: New ABA Law School Rules Have Bari Weiss Blog Drawing Some WILD Conclusions
Yale Law School Free Speech Crisis Mostly Fake News


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.