(December 3, 2021) - Kteba Dunlap, Meera Gajjar and Josh Numainville, three Westlaw Today reporters with different backgrounds and law school experiences, are taking a closer look at the intersection of race and law in U.S. history.

This week the De novo review team is sharing the experiences of Roger Williams University School of Law professors Diana Hassel and Nicole Dyszlewski, who teach the class Race & the Foundations of American Law.

RWU piloted the course in spring 2021 as an elective and made it mandatory in the fall.

"Our job is to train students to think critically for themselves. But if we train without providing essential information, including the ways in which race has always been central to American law, then their education is incomplete," Gregory Bowman, the law school's dean, said in an interview with Reuters earlier this year.

The De novo review team asked Hassel and Dyszlewski about their approaches to designing and teaching a class that confronts the U.S. legal system's role in racial inequality. The following responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Nicole Dyszlewski: The class was developed directly in response to student advocacy. We are at a law school where that matters. RWU Law's goal was to create a mandatory class to address white supremacy and systems of oppression in U.S. law, and the faculty voted to create the class for that purpose. For that, we are proud and hopeful.

Diana Hassel: The course is designed around three themes: historical origins of white supremacy, current systems of racism and strategies for going forward. Within the historical origins section of the course, we cover colonialism, slavery, the Constitution and views of the Framers, and the Reconstruction Era. Then we move on to current issues such as mass incarceration, voting, public education and the legal profession. And finally, we talk about strategies for dismantling racial hierarchy through initiatives such as truth and reconciliation processes, reparations, critical race theory and anti-racist lawyering.

ND: In some ways, this is the most important question because we are not just asking students to read about systems of oppression, race and the law. We are asking them to reflect on these topics in weekly essays, to research and write a final paper, and to teach and engage with each other in a group project. Most fundamentally, we are asking students to candidly discuss these issues with us and each other every week. There is no hiding from class discussions.

We continually strive to create and maintain a classroom environment that is both a brave space and a safe space. We start the class by talking about our identities and allowing the students to share the parts of their identities with which they feel comfortable. This sets the tone that all of us are human and we are all experiencing this class with our own identity as a lens, informed by our own biases and experiences.

Next, we have a set of classroom discussion rules, which we introduce at the beginning of class and about which we ask for student input. One rule, for example, is to not allow any hypotheticals about race/bias in the classroom. Another is to make vulnerability a value. We give the students permission to make mistakes and make it clear we should all act with grace toward others in the classroom. We encourage students to speak with candor and engage in genuine discussion.

ND: I had no idea of the extent to which Rhode Islanders were involved in the slave trade, specifically in Bristol, Rhode Island, the town in which our school is located and this class is taught. It is also interesting to see the role that cognitive dissonance plays when students are forced to reexamine long-held beliefs about history, the United States, the criminal justice system, racism and fairness.

ND: I think the class has an interesting arc. For the first five weeks or so, students express shock that they were misinformed about race as a social construct or not taught certain basic historical information regarding United States history. They also tend to react pretty strongly to the violence of colonization and slavery, which we read about in the form of slave codes and historical narratives.

In the second five weeks, we tend to see students express some serious disenchantment with the law. They begin to see the through-line that runs from our nation's history to modern systems of oppression. And once they see that, they have to reconcile it with their own construction of the legal profession they are about to join.

In the final third of the class, some students are inspired to make change and to really make this knowledge a part of their professional identity and mission going forward into the practice of law. Others are still grappling with the material and trying to work out what to do with what they have learned. But I don't think anyone comes away from the class unchanged. That includes those of us teaching the class.

DH: Students are introduced to the history of the development of our current legal regime and examine how that development was influenced by the desire to preserve racial hierarchy. This knowledge allows students to bring a more critical and skeptical approach to all aspects of legal doctrine.

DH: In the last third of the class, we discuss current ideas and strategies for undoing some of the injustice embedded in our current system. We look at the work activists and scholars are doing in this area and discuss the merits and limitations of various approaches. We particularly focus on the role of lawyers in addressing racial inequality in the legal system. We discuss what it means to be anti-racist and how that might apply to various legal roles such as prosecutor, defense attorney, litigator and judge. Another approach — reconciliation and repair — was a central topic. What would that look like? What conversations need to happen? Should there be direct compensation to victims of white supremacy — and if so, from whom?

Westlaw Today publishes De novo review on Fridays.