As some of you may know, for the past two years, I have taught a one-semester law school course in an Inside-Out format. Inside-Out is a national program based at Temple University that trains university professors to teach courses at correctional facilities, with half of the participants coming from their home academic institutions and half from inside the facility. I teach a course on Gender & Criminal Law, involving residents of the Western Massachusetts Correctional Alcohol Center and students from Western New England University. (An article about this course will appear sometime in the next year or so in the Journal of Legal Education, as part of a mini-symposium about law teaching that engages incarceration). I frequently tell colleagues that the conversations in our Inside-Out course are particularly rich; that the law students experience it as very meaningful; and that I feel there is a benefit in future lawyers entering into dialogue with people serving sentences. But why exactly do I think this is such an important way of learning about the law? There are many ways to respond to that question, but one strand is about how we learn and what we know. Put differently, it’s about methods and epistemology.
In his essay in a book edited with Martha Fineman, Feminist & Queer Legal Theory, Adam Romero provides a “methodological description” of feminist theory, quoting feminist theorists who have asked, “how do we know what we know?” Describing the work of scholars such as Fineman and Angela Harris, Romero writes that “feminist methodology . . . tends to involve making theory more concrete, by, for example, emphasizing lived experience, context, situation, and specifics, not abstractions.” This is exactly what I like about Inside-Out. We learn about criminal law by going into a corrections facility and discussing cases and ideas with people who have had experiences in the system (both men and women; it’s a co-ed facility). Romero quotes Katherine Bartlett explaining the feminist project: “to be engaged, with others, in a critical, transformative process of seeking further partial knowledges from one’s admittedly limited habitat.” According to Bartlett, “[f]eminist doing is, in this sense, feminist knowing.” Yup. That sounds like Inside-Out to me, at least in a methodogical sense. Other law profs have done Inside-Out training and are scheduled to teach courses, and I’d be happy to speak with anyone who would like to hear more.
Posted by GiovannaShay on June 14, 2012 at 11:17 AM
Comments
I perhaps should have noted: “spirited” according to LEF precedential standards.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Jun 14, 2012 11:31:18 AM
This is the first I’ve heard of this and, for what it’s worth, am delighted to learn teachers and students are involved in such a project. It’s more imaginative than a “mandatory” pro bono requirement (which I think is capable of accomplishing similar ends), about which we had a spirited debate at the Legal Ethics Forum: http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2012/05/ben-cooper-mandatory-pro-bono-redux.html#comments
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Jun 14, 2012 11:27:41 AM