Widening the Lens

No registration is required for in-person attendance.

Please note, this event is primarily in-person and open to all who are interested, including students, faculty, practicing lawyers, academics, staff, and others.

If you cannot make it to Cambridge/Harvard, you can register to view the event via Zoom here.

Friday, October 18 and Saturday 19, 2024

Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, Milstein East Conference Center, Wasserstein Hall

In a time when racial inclusion in US law schools is under debate and attack, this conference poses fundamental, empirically based challenges to law teaching. Many years ago, New Legal Realism (NLR) co-founder David Wilkins critiqued the standard legal approach to “bleached-out professionalism” for Black lawyers. We draw from that work, as well as from relevant social science research and theory, from Critical Race Theory, from research outside of mainstream Global North traditions, and from other perspectives that shake up taken-for-granted “truths” undergirding traditional U.S. legal education. Furthermore, conference participants will bring new paradigms developed within the legal academy to bear on assumptions that have guided traditional Western social science itself. In opening up this truly interdisciplinary space for conversation, the conference will encourage the development of expansive research and teaching frameworks for the legal academy—frameworks containing possibilities for real change.

New Legal Realism (NLR) is a movement that began in the early 2000s, aimed at producing and translating excellent empirical research on law and legal institutions for legal professionals. With deep roots in the law-and-society tradition, NLR has worked to build bridges between social science and the legal academy and has always highlighted research on legal education. NLR scholars have published cutting-edge articles on how to integrate social science into legal training, working between theory, empirical research, and the practices involved in law teaching. As those scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, there are very important links between legal education and the ethical orientations of the legal profession. Those ethics depend importantly on perspectives that take the social reality of law seriously, as well on inclusive visions for the profession as a whole in a democratic state. From its first conference in 2004, NLR has engaged deeply with race, gender, and global approaches to law as foundational parts of research on law in books and law in action.