I can relate.
I have been attending William Mitchell College of Law as a part-time evening student. In addition to my full-time job as a professor. In addition to raising three children (ten and under) with my husband. This means it has taken me 23 months to complete the first year, or “1L” curriculum.
And don’t get me started about Contracts.
My experience last year in Contracts was more traumatizing than James T. Hart’s in The Paperchase. One of my concerns was that we did not have a casebook. In Mary Joe Frug’s book Postmodern Legal Feminism she argues that a casebook is a powerful document. She writes, “The editorial choices within a casebook determine how many readers think about law …” She agrees with Stanly Fish that, “linguistic and textual facts, rather than being objects of interpretation are its products.”In my class, we were e-mailed the chapters two days before class. How I was supposed to learn a doctrinal course without a table of contents or an index?
Without a table of contents, I wasn’t able to put the assignment in context, which would have allowed me to anticipate the content or activate prior knowledge. A table of contents would have helped me to determine my purpose for reading and would have helped me to connect the assignment to other parts of the course. Without this important learning tool, I was not able to see why the case was important and isolate the “focus issue.”
As an academic, I can appreciate the need to publish, but as a student I was lost without a book.
Then, there’s the issue of law and gender. When I entered Contracts, I underestimated how much my views about gender would affect my understanding of the law. In 1988 W. David Slawson, Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, and chair of the Contracts Section of the Association of American Law Schools, declined a proposal for a joint Association program with feminists. In a publicly circulated letter, he explained his decision by elaborating his view that:
“Feminist theory, was unlikely (ever) to contribute significantly to contract law because the male bias of our society…has not had important consequences for contract law.”Twenty years later, not much has changed and I wish I had known what to expect.
The year I graduated from college (1991) Patricia J. Williams published On Being the Object of Property (as a gift of intelligent rage), in The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Williams uses a combination of feminist personal narrative and legal discourse to analyze how contract law exercises a “deadening power” by creating in the individual “a passive relationship to the document: it is the contract that governs, that ‘does’ everything, that absorbs all responsibility and deflects all other recourse.” Her article further explores in particular how this quality of contract negatively affects those who have been institutionally (and thus legally) formulated as inferior: people of color and women.
As someone who earned a Ph.D. by addressing issues of inequality and then spent ten years teaching critical race feminism to undergraduates, I couldn’t help but feel that the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” (Audre Lorde) I kick myself however, because at nearly forty years old, I willingly entered the master’s house, and couldn’t bring myself to use his tools.
Next month I will take my last two “1L” exams (finally!). I will enter them with less trepidation and with lowered expectations. Because of exams, I won’t return to blogging until May. The topic? On turning 40! For now however, I’m a sister who REALLY needs to study, so wish a sister luck.
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