On the importance of an anti-oppression lens in ELGC and beyond
Last month, 1L students kicked off their Winter semester with two weeks of Osgoode’s mandatory course, Ethical Lawyering in a Global Community. Known to most as ELGC, the course aims to orient new law students to professional norms and ethical issues faced by lawyers. The course was introduced to Osgoode in 2006 and covers topics such as professionalism, equality, access to justice, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, Indigenous legal traditions, and cross-cultural approaches to lawyering.
Potential to address hard-hitting topics
Many student leaders see the potential for ELGC to engage 1Ls in a deeper understanding of how racism and other forms of systemic oppression operate in the legal profession. Barbara Brown (2L), Equity Advisor of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), said the course provides “a great framework for discussing these issues, because it is mandatory and because its focus is on ethics in lawyering — which directly implicates anti-oppression issues.”
Roshni Khemraj (2L), Co-Chair of the South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA), echoed this sentiment, stating that the course is “already a site for difficult conversations and introspection,” and as such, “holds so much potential to address meaningful and hard-hitting topics that can help law students situate themselves among the spectrum of privilege and oppression.”
“A lot of concerning moments”
However, student comments about the course suggest that ELGC may be falling short of its potential. For Radhika Sharma (1L), the course fails to adequately “discuss the ways in which intersectionality — gender, race, socio-economic standing — may affect what choices new lawyers make” and wrongly assumes that all students start on equal footing.
Some students have also noticed unsettling classroom interactions during ELGC. Kristal Patterson* (3L), shared that when she took ELGC, “there were a lot of concerning moments.” She recalled online course forum posts that denied the existence of systemic racism which went unaddressed, as well as several “racially biased comments” made by the professor about fellow classmates. At one point, Patterson said the professor “struggled to articulate a coherent explanation of white privilege.”
For Ali Imrie (2L), President of the Disability Collective of Osgoode, ELGC lacked any substantive mention of disability, and failed to meaningfully address the ways in which ableism is also a form of structural oppression. “As one of the only visibly disabled students in my class, year, and school, this omission was frustrating and made me feel like my experiences were being overlooked,” said Imrie.
Shruti Ramesh (3L) said that ELGC “did not consider much around LGBTQ+ issues, disability, or the needs of other equity-seeking groups.” When diversity was discussed, she noticed it was almost exclusively “couched in the realms of race and gender.”
Shared syllabus, different approaches
Anti-oppression training aims to help people unpack the ways in which power and oppression — on the basis of race, gender, class, disability, religion, sexual orientation — shape the world they live in. As part of the process, participants are often prompted to interrogate their own social location –– to reflect on the ways they contribute to, are affected by, or are complicit in perpetuating various systems of oppression.
Gabby Aquino (1L), of the Asian Law Students Association, stressed that an anti-oppression lens to legal ethics education is critical for helping students understand the ways “the law itself has historically been used as a tool of oppression” and the “inherent violence of the law for different groups”.
The ELGC syllabus contains multiple readings on how law operates as a system of power, creating and perpetuating social structures that reinforce privilege and oppression based on race, gender, and settler colonialism. The four course instructors, however, have discretion on how and the extent to which they broach these topics in class.
Fay Faraday, ELGC’s course director, teaches the course through an anti-racism, anti-oppression lens. She frames ELGC “as a skills building course that brings a critical, equity lens to power in the legal profession.” She teaches students that the law can be both a system of reform and oppression, pointing to examples such as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism in the criminal justice system and the trauma of property law on stolen land. Ultimately, Faraday said, “This is a course that will make you uncomfortable. If you don’t feel uncomfortable, you’re not doing the work.”
Faraday added, “Any course can be taught through an anti-racism and anti-oppression lens. It is not something that finds an exclusive home within ELGC.”
Another ELGC instructor, Trevor Farrow, called the course “an ally in the curriculum for the project of anti-oppression”, adding that he was “very open to feedback, to input, to discussions about how we can make good on the promise that we think we are doing.” Farrow was ELGC’s inaugural course director and part of the original team who put the course together.
Allan Hutchinson, also one of the course’s initial designers, has taught ELGC most years since its inception. When asked for comment, he said an anti-oppression lens is “absolutely essential” and is something he tries to incorporate for all of the courses he teaches.
Osgoode students push for anti-racism and anti-oppression training
In March 2018, BLSA released a report detailing a history of anti-Black racism at the law school since 2001. The report lists incidents involving hate letters addressed to Black women attending Osgoode; racial profiling of Black students by Osgoode security and Osgoode library staff; graffiti in an Osgoode washroom stating, “its okay to be white”; and most recently, defacement of Osgoode’s Black History Month display in February 2018.
To hold the law school accountable, BLSA published a list of ten recommendations for addressing anti-Black racism in the school. Among these recommendations were suggested changes to ELGC: equity training for course instructors, more racialized professors teaching the course, and inclusion of anti-Black racism as a topic in the course syllabus. The report highlights concerns from Black students around “the conduct, and overall ineptness of professors, when speaking about racialized issues” and the normalization of “racially charged comments that go unchecked” from both students and faculty. Currently, ELGC course instructors are chosen by the Associate Dean (Academic), and are not required to participate in anti-racism or anti-oppression training.
BLSA’s report also recommended a mandatory 1L session on anti-Black racism at the law school and in the legal profession, curricular reforms to criminal law and constitutional law classes to include integration of Black narratives, and hiring processes that address the dearth of visibly Black professors amongst Osgoode faculty.
Given that anti-oppressive education has not been consistently integrated into the 1L curriculum, student groups have taken matters into their own hands. In February 2018, BLSA, Osgoode Feminist Collective, SALSA, and Osgoode Hall Law Union (OHLU) worked together to organize and raise funds for a workshop titled “Lawyering in an Anti-Oppressive Framework”, facilitated by anti-oppression educator Rania El Mugammar. A similar workshop was held in January 2019, organized by OUTLaws, the Osgoode Indigenous Students Association (OISA), OHLU, Disability Collective of Osgoode, SALSA, Osgoode Peer Survivor Network, and Student Caucus.
Brown noticed that these voluntary sessions tended to attract people who were already familiar with issues related to anti-racism and anti-oppression. Last year, she reached out to student groups about the idea of integrating anti-oppression into ELGC, which would make it mandatory for students to engage with these topics who otherwise wouldn’t choose to do so.
“Members from OISA, SALSA, OLAS [Osgoode Latin American Students], the Disability Collective, and OUTLaws were all incredibly supportive of the idea, and we began talking about what topics we thought were important to include in such discussions,” she said. Brown then brought these suggestions to Faraday, who was “enthusiastic about integrating it into her course materials.”
Brown had a chance to sit in on Faraday’s lectures this past August, and thought she did a “fantastic job” of introducing 1L students to these discussions. She hopes to see other professors do the same.
“Clearly, it can be done,” said Brown. “I refuse to believe that with all the complex legal questions we tackle, anti-oppression and anti-racism is somehow too difficult to address. To allow us to forget the pitfalls and misuses of law and to fail to challenge us to be critical about our use of law invites us to repaint a painful landscape of oppression.”
Opportunities for curricular reform
As part of the administration’s response to BLSA’s recommendations, a new non-credit, co-curricular course, “Lawyering Using an Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Lens” was made available to Osgoode students in 2019. Currently running for a second year, this course introduces students to concepts such as anti-Black racism, systemic oppression, and intersectionality. The weekly night class is optional and has nine students enrolled this semester, despite there being over 900 students enrolled in the JD program at Osgoode.
Mya Rimon, Assistant Dean of Students at Osgoode, recognized that the optional co-curricular course was a “more nimble” response to BLSA’s concerns in the short term, given that major mandatory curricular changes tend to be larger undertakings that take more time.
Osgoode’s new strategic plan — currently in development and set for release this summer — may be the opportunity to fully integrate BLSA’s recommendations. Benjamin Berger, current Chair of the Academic Planning and Policy Committee (APPC), said that major curricular reforms are guided by the law school’s strategic priorities, and as such, typically follow the release of new strategic plans. The last major 1L curriculum reform at Osgoode, which took place in 2006, saw the introduction of ELGC.
A sub-committee of the APPC is presently focusing on addressing issues arising from a 1L Curriculum Review Report produced in 2019. With both the strategic plan and review of the 1L curriculum underway, there is currently an opportunity for administration to respond to the concerns of student groups — such as those raised by BLSA — and to integrate a mandatory anti-racism and anti-oppression component to 1L learning.
Madison Pulfer, a 2L student member of the sub-committee, shared that they have discussed whether anti-oppression training should be a stand-alone event or part of the broader curriculum. Shellie Kierstead, the faculty member leading the sub-committee, said they are “very attentive to BLSA’s report”, but “it would be premature to share more until possibilities and proposals are more mature.”
The value of self-reflexive interrogation in legal education
Anti-oppression training is already a part of some clinical training programs at the law school, such as the Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services and the Feminist Advocacy Clinical Program organized in partnership with the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic. These programs demonstrate that anti-oppression training for law students is not only possible, but also offers important value to legal education.
Adrian Smith, Academic Director of the Poverty Law program, said, “It should be unacceptable to engage in legal clinical or public interest work, community lawyering — indeed advocacy work of any fashion — without an ongoing commitment to anti-oppressive learning.”
Smith emphasized that in addition to specific anti-oppression training opportunities, the Poverty Law program as a whole is motivated by ongoing “self-reflexive interrogation of leading assumptions in and about law, assumptions which underpin our unjust and unequal social order.” Smith said this kind of learning encourages students to understand how law can be “both a source and site of disadvantage and injustice.”
Janet Mosher, Academic Director for the Feminist Advocacy program, said that anti-oppression is core to the clinical program’s values. Mosher noted challenges with delivering anti-oppression training well, even for a small group of students who have self-selected to engage in social justice work. She pointed to the academic literature, which shows that effective anti-oppression training needs to look different depending on students’ social location and the degree of privilege they have experienced.
Mosher emphasized that true anti-oppressive practice is an ongoing path, not something that students can fully learn after one or two sessions. She pointed out that continuous self-reflection and humility is part of what it means to be a good lawyer.
“All lawyers need the ability to look inside themselves — and to understand that the way they understand the world, the way they might evaluate a client’s story is really informed by their location, and is likely infused by all kinds of misassumptions,” she said. “You need to develop this kind of orientation to how you think, how you do your work, and how you interact with others.”
“It’s this openness to change and to being challenged — that everything you know is tentative. I think about the literature from Indigenous scholars about humility — to understand that in a really deep way. That’s part of what we need to be good lawyers.”
*Student requested a pseudonym to protect privacy.