Penn State Dickinson Law Weaves Anti-Racism into Courses

Penn State Dickinson Law, one of the oldest U.S. law schools, and other campuses are revamping their curriculums with the goal of teaching aspiring lawyers how to fight racism.

Spurred on by events, including the killing of George Floyd, the Carlisle, Pa.-based school created a year-long required course called “Race and Equal Protection of the Laws.” It teaches students the relationship between race and law in areas such as housing, health care, criminal justice, democracy, and capitalism.

“We are rebuilding our 187-year-old law school on an anti-racist platform,” Dickinson Law’s dean, Danielle M. Conway, said in an interview. “We are reconsidering not only what we teach—but how we teach—to make sure people practice law in a way that promotes equal treatment of all.”

Dickinson Law is among a growing number of schools that since last summer have been finding new ways to weave anti-racism efforts into the core of the legal education they offer students.

The University of Southern California Gould School of Law in Los Angeles announced last month it will introduce a required course on race, racism and the law in the coming academic year.

The Gould course is designed to help students recognize “that race is an enduring part of the legal profession and our everyday lives,” said Franita Tolson, vice dean of the school.

Tulane Law School in New Orleans last fall added a course titled Anti-Racism Lawyering. The University of Colorado Law School in Boulder, Colo., said last year it would propose to faculty a graduation requirement that students take a course, independent study or prescribed readings on diversity and race.

Conway said that after Floyd’s death, she contacted fellow deans and they began to brainstorm how to provide law students a better understanding of current events, how those events affected the legal system, and what could be done to combat racism.

“There was a cascade of murders of Black people, and that was alongside the pandemic, which disproportionately impacted Black and Brown people, and alongside voter suppression,” Conway said. “Legal education needed to respond to the assault on democracy and the rule of law.”

Conway and four other Black women deans created the Law Deans Antitrust Clearinghouse Project last year. The project has a website for law school administrators and faculty with books, articles, and studies that address racism in legal education.

“The explosion of events has made us understand that we are all connected,” she said.

At Dickinson Law, students can also earn a civil rights, equal protection and social justice certificate after taking relevant courses. The school doubled its population of students of color, from 22% to 44%, last year, and is on track to see similar gains in 2021, Conway said.

Dickinson Law has also increased its faculty of color to 26% last year from 12% in 2017.

Some of law schools’ efforts will be the focus of the Rutgers Race and the Law Review Symposium, held on Zoom, starting April 12.