For more information please read the DisOrientation Guide
The students who excel in law schools—and the best lawyers—are the ones who are able to detach law and to see it as a system that makes sense only from a particular viewpoint. Those lawyers can operate within that view, and then shift out of it for purposes of critique, analysis, and strategy.
– Professor Mari Matsuda[1]
Deal 1Ls,
You are now in week 6 of your 1L year. You have sat through Contracts, Property, Civil Procedure, Torts, Criminal Law, and/or LRW. You have probably experienced heightened anxiety, nerves, stress, or exhaustion from all the micro- and explicit-aggressions and emotional laborand boredom because of the unstimulating curriculum. You might have felt out of place because you are one of the few LGBTQ, low-income[2], POC, womxn, or differently-abled students in many spaces on campus. You may have felt that students can dismiss your entire existence when explaining the holding of a case and, then, when you speak up, you are labeled divisive. Yet, you weren’t prepared for any of this during your orientation.
As you sit in class or walk through the banal, white halls of HLS, probably putting on a mask for your self-preservation, you may have also felt the anxiety and stress of knowing that people back home are figuring out how to respond to the injustice brought on by structural oppression. These experiences, combined with the overtly competitive and hierarchical nature of the legal profession, create a toxic law school environment that produces real cognitive and psychological impacts. In a 2018 survey, 25% of HLS students reported that they experience depression and 24% reported suffering from anxiety, and 66% of respondents only started exhibited these mental health issues in law school. Yet, HLS has refused to publicly release findings following a student mental health survey in 2017 or adopt most of the requested changes to the availability of mental health services.
If you feel in any way similar to this, it’s not you, it’s HLS.
In fact, it’s the entire law school experience and legal profession, which is designed to reproduce these oppressive social hierarchies. Specifically, the toxic, competitive, and exhausting law school environment is intentionally designed to mold over 80% of HLS students to enter therat race of big law.[3]
If you feel that the law school curriculum does not speak to any of your experiences or reasons for attending law school, it’s not you, it’s the law school. The law is taught matter-of-factly through colorblind discourse with the Professor concentrating the production of knowledge. Students are indoctrinated to master case law, internalize the rules and rationales, and communicate in a new abstract legal writing style. However, we are not encouraged to challenge, contextualize, dismantle, build community power, or develop new paradigms of decolonial knowledge. We often avoid open discussions of racism and inequality while studying laws that perpetuate, and are sometimes explicitly rooted in, racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, ableism,and social inequality. Our legal system carries a legacy of genocide and codifyingforced displacement of Native Americans,abuse and claimed ownership of black and brown bodies, and institutionalized injustice. Law school is a political institution and, to the extent that it replicates a system in which resources and privileges are allocated in an irrational or unfair way,it is an instrument of oppression.
It is a political choice that HLS does not offer a curriculum that could help law students build a more just, equitable, and free world. Yet HLS, like other law schools, continues to place high structural barriers in the way of our ability to pursue public interest work sustainably by, for example, burying us in piles of debt andstructurally handcuffing us. For those of us from first-generation, low-income, or immigrant households (who must financially provide for our families while in law school), there are almost no roads to pursue social justice work as a career, despite HLS’ $1.7B endowment. For students of color, the racial disparity in the amount, repayment, and impact of student loan debt compared to white students is stark and places additional burdens. Yet, when we advocate for equitable financial aid policies, we are largely denied. But why? This is one of the many questions we are still waiting for answers for. By failing to make these substantive changes, HLS, and tenured faculty members who serve in leadership capacities, reproduce the oppressive social hierarchies and contribute to the justice gap. That is, while over 80% of HLS graduates work in big law, over 86% of low-income people in the U.S. do not have their legal needs met annually and 71% of low-income households experience at least one civil legal problem, according to a 2017 report from the Legal Services Corporation, an independent government nonprofit. HLS is complicit in making it structurally difficult for us to actually serve those most in need in society by funneling us to the highest corporate bidder.
HLS has always been a deeply politically contentious environment. Recently, HLS, through the Dean of Students Office, has tried to surveil and attempt to squash our voices, often by isolating students and threatening disciplinary actions. However, we are reminded that historically students from marginalized communities – namely folx of color, LGBTQ folx, womxn, and disabled folx – have always fought (and even sued) the school to ensure that they could be here. Our existence, voices, and ideas are always points of contention and resistance on campus. For decades, students, often supported by faculty, have continued the tradition of not only fighting for space but for deep structural change. Students have fought to reclaim our space and create new critical pedagogies that center the voices of marginalized people and view the law as a tool for structural social change. Today, we continue this fight. Groups on campus are calling for gender equity at HLS,ending harassment and discrimination in the legal profession, a graduate student union and labor protections, better financial aid policies, ending racism on campus, establishing an HLS diversity & inclusion committee, CRT and diverse faculty, reparations, divestment from the Prison Industrial Complex, establishing a movement lawyering clinic, and ending the US-backed Israeli settler-occupation in Palestine. In 2019, students organized the first Critical Race Theory Conference in an effort to increase CRT faculty, unite student efforts, and produce radical scholarship and new legal frameworks. As has been demonstrated, when we organize, we win!
DisOrientation is meant to reclaim our history of struggle and to organize our own production of knowledge to create radical localized knowledge, so that we may develop our own decolonized praxis and not use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. DisOrientation critically acknowledges the native Massachusett people whose land we stand on and which was taken by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts via a mass genocide. We also recognize Belindawho, in 1783, sued the man who enslaved her, Isaac Royall – the same man whose slave trade wealthestablished HLS – for unpaid compensation and won, securing an annual pension of 15 pounds, 12 shillings. We also recognize all those who cannot attend because they are behind the prison walls or deported by a society that criminalizes and cages with impunity but who lack adequate legal aid. They’re not here because too often brilliance is only acknowledged when it accompanies a certain race or zip code or pedigree or socioeconomic status or gender presentation. They are not here due to the plunder and exploitation that elite big law firms facilitate, and because those intergenerationally at the margins lack basic access to legal aid and services.
We invite all law students to engage in an act of self-preservation and political warfare by preserving the many energies, ancestral stories, visions, struggles, peoples, and communities which inspired you to come to law school and fight for justice. By hosting DisOrientation, we refuse to continue to endure the burden of neutrality and colorblindness placed upon students of color at this institution. We refuse to accept that HLS is a neutral force in the world and reject the legal fiction of objectivity and liberalism that HLS uses to stifle and suppress our demands. We acknowledge that the HLS curriculum is inadequate to address the violent experiences of people globally. By continuing this movement of resistance, and by bringing DisOrientation to Belinda Hall each year, we not only challenge the acts of silencing that this institution seeks to impose, but we do so through the power of coalition-building, ancestral memory, and by producing our own knowledge and unabashed pride for our lived truths that have made us who we are today. This institution will not make us water down who we are in order to exist in its walls; rather, our self-preservation is the most powerful act of resistance we bring to this space. Today, and every day, we call upon our peers and communities to remain endlessly aware, endlessly critical.
We invite the law school faculty, HLS students, and the community to engage with us.
Signed,
A Collective of DisOrientation Student Organizers
[1] See Mari J. Matsuda, When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method, 11 Women’s Rights Rts. L. Rep. 7 (1989).
[2] 77.5%of HLS students are from families that make more than $95,000/year and have more than $175,000 in wealth holdings.
[3] See also, Ben W. Heineman, Jr. William F. Lee, and David B. Wilkins, “Lawyers as Professionals and as Citizens: Key Roles and Responsibilities in the 21st Century,” Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/corp_gov/articles/Heineman-HLSCLP-11-20-14.pdf(Discussing how the for-profit companies and law firms establish the norms, required skills, and market that law schools should adhere to in developing its programs, curriculum, and skill, and curriculum.