Legal Education
CRT Bans Disallow Discussion of AZ Election Law Case
Nicholas B. Creel | Georgia College and State University, Assistant Professor of Business Law and Ethics
July 21, 2021
As a law professor, it’s my job to read these decisions so that I may teach the points of law that come from them. I take pride in doing just that regardless of my personal views as to whether any case was decided “correctly” or not. It’s on me as an instructor to teach students the points of law from Supreme Court cases, not to impart any political biases I carry. Setting one’s emotions aside in this process can be difficult, but after years of practice, I’d like to think I’ve become adept at just that.
However, in reading this latest case, I’ve found myself falling increasingly into despondency the more that I think about it. I am, in all honesty, disappointed in the Court’s decision, but that isn’t what has been eating away at me. My melancholy is instead fed by the realization that I may be legally barred from even discussing the case should the spate of recent bans on critical race theory (CRT) make their way to Georgia’s universities.[6]
Read the full post here.
A New Vision for IRAC: Applying a Restorative Justice Methodology to Legal Analysis
Robert Sand | Vermont Law School, Founding Director, Center for Justice Reform
November 20, 2020
Generations of law students have learned the IRAC method of legal analysis. IRAC: Issue – Rule – Apply – Conclude. IRAC provides a consistent and straightforward way to analyze legal disputes in all areas whether property, torts, contracts, criminal law, or anything else typically studied in law school. The clarity of IRAC informs legal reasoning, the practice of law, and judicial decisions. For all its straightforward simplicity, IRAC is also remarkably reductionist.
Noted Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie writes: “Training in law is training in simplification. It is a trained incapacity to look at all values in a situation, and instead to select only the legally relevant ones, that is, those defined by the high priests within the system to be the relevant ones.”
Perhaps Christie goes too far, denying the power of the law to effect change. Yet, he is correct about the reductionist nature of the law and, by extension, legal education. Human disputes, and the harm at their root, are complex, messy, emotionally laden matters. We have developed a legal system to place a framework around all that messiness and in the process have lost, perhaps, some of our humanity.
Read the full post here.