Abstract
Excerpted From: Doron Samuel-Siegel, Dismantling the Whiteness of Legal Education, 25 Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal 280 (2025-2026) (232 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Whiteness pervades legal education. It shapes everything from curricular design and norms about the rule of law, to bar exam preparation and approaches to professional competency. For example, whiteness sustains the false belief that race and racism are tangential to most coursework rather than foundational to understanding how law operates in society. It also underlies the failure to prepare law graduates to think systematically about dismantling structural racism. And its influence extends beyond the classroom itself, contributing to insufficient institutional attention to racialized disparities in bar passage rates and to the broader inequities those disparities reproduce within the legal profession.
Whiteness operates as an allegiance to structural racism. As a result of its influence, whether intentionally or not, legal education reproduces structural racism and produces lawyers ill-equipped to contribute effectively to the project of racial justice. Because of structural racism, people who are racialized as white reap unearned benefits, while people who are racially minoritized can experience systematic harms. The consequences of structural racism’s reproduction are visible not only in legal education, but also in the legal reasoning and institutional decision-making that shape democratic life. As renowned civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill has observed with respect to Supreme Court Justices, there is currently a failure to cultivate the kinds of racial literacy, historical understanding, and democratic accountability necessary for principled legal decision-making in a multiracial society. Her observations pertain equally to all lawyers and judges more broadly. Only with such competencies can legal reasoning become sufficiently “robust, complex, mature, and accountable” to counteract entrenched legal structures that have failed to realize the promise of equal protection.
The shortcomings in the judicial reasoning that Ifill critiques are, at least in part, likely byproducts of the Justices’ legal education, which was shaped by whiteness but devoid of explicit training about how whiteness functions and how it might be dismantled. Although today’s lawyers and judges did not create the world that produced these deficiencies, they are now helping to shape the world that follows. Without interruption and dismantlement, legal education will continue reproducing the inequities of structural racism rather than equipping lawyers to challenge them.
Recognizing these dynamics requires closer examination of the role legal education itself plays in reproducing structural racial inequality. Scholarship has long documented the benefits and harms produced by structural racism across societal domains, from wealth, to health, and beyond, and has examined the role of legal education in this dynamic. Further, this scholarship has only recently begun to focus specifically on the role of whiteness, describing the absence of education about whiteness in law school curricula, and documenting how law schools function as “white spaces” where the people, architecture, curricular substance, and teaching practices preserve white advantage.
Yet, there remains a need for scholarship that examines how whiteness operates within legal education itself and delves deeply into how legal educators might dismantle its influence within law school pedagogy and culture. That need is especially pressing because law schools are duty bound to participate in the eradication of racial injustice. Law schools undertake an obligation to educate lawyers capable of “effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession”12-a profession with a “special responsibility for the quality of justice.”
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