Teaching
My teaching interests and preferences trail my research: I am interested in teaching courses that will benefit from both my interdisciplinary training as well as my comparative perspective. Over the past decade, I have designed and taught classes for students at different levels of instruction ranging from social stratification and global inequality, to international business transactions and family law.
Even as my teaching interests and experience vary in substance, my pedagogy is guided by a synthesis of the three core principles instrumental to my own learning process – critical engagement, relevance and openness. Training students to share agency in the classroom is an integral part of my pedagogy. At the same time, I remain aware of the limitations of having a strict understanding of “critical engagement”. Beyond the references I make in class, it is crucial that my teaching has “legs”: I want my students to see the relevance of their training in their everyday life and interactions. As in my research, my interdisciplinary training and affinity for global comparisons is a staple element of my teaching. My goal is to train students to evaluate on the basis of intellectual inquiry alongside a deep respect for the power of the relational. I believe that cultivating this balance is essential for our times: especially as environments beyond the classroom increasingly demand our patience for diverse identity, logic and thought. On my views on equity, politics, and identity in the law school classroom more generally, see this interview.
In addition to teaching, I am committed to building (and being part of) scholar-practitioner-activist communities that can reimagine the futures for inclusive pedagogy and student-focussed institutional change. I co-run a LSA collaborative research network (CRN 19) on legal education, and serve on the executive committee for the AALS section on empirical legal education. For my research on these related topics, especially on diversity and stratified experiences within legal education, see here.
While the real reward to teaching is the capacity to co-journey with my students and peers, I’ve been humbled and invigorated by the institutional recognition by these communities over the years. In my last two years at Stanford, I was recognized for my commitment to teaching, research, and service with the Vice Provost’s Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence Doctoral Fellowship. For the academic year 2020-1, my second year at UCI Law, I was named a colleague-nominated AALS Teacher of the Year award, as well as won the student-nominated Professor of the Year award.
Below is a sampling of the kinds of classes I have offered over the last few years. If you would like to read my syllabi or learn more about my teaching orientations and pedagogical ethics (especially as we transition to virtual+ learning), please be in touch. I am always eager to talk and learn more about making the classroom as useful and equitable as it possibly can be.
+ G.U.I.L.T | Gendered Understandings in Law and Legal Theory
Is gender even a useful category of analysis? What happens when we consider law reform, critique, and resistance as parts of feminist discourse? Are laws – and rights that flow from law – useful across contexts? What are the limits to emancipation? What frameworks offer solutions of legal alterity? How is alterity limited?
This course trains students to think more critically about the complicated relationships between gender, law, and society. Across a range of contexts and levels of analysis, we consider the importance of dissecting law with a gendered lens to unpack its seemingly neutral and agendered assumptions. To conduct this interrogation, the first few weeks of the course set up a strong theoretical grounding and a feminist framework for legal analysis. In the weeks following, these frameworks are used to consider different areas of law and policy, especially considering the ways they intersect with other identity categories like race, class, national context, and ability. Although we spend time talking about what have typically been thought of as gender issues (e.g. identity, body, work, and family), the goal of the class is to equip students to unpack gendered meanings across intersectional contexts and to cultivate an understanding of most processes as inherently gendered even when they do not expressly call attention to gender.
+ LEGAL PROFESSION
What does it mean to be a lawyer? How do you “think like a lawyer”? Should you think like a lawyer? What are the moral, relational and ethical considerations that ground you when you act in the capacity of a legal professional?
This (required 1L) course is designed to help students think critically about the role of lawyers in society. At its core, it's a primer for legal practice, laying the groundwork for understanding ethical boundaries of practicing law across contexts. Alongside doctrine, however, this course draws from cross-disciplinary perspectives to unpack the ways in which lawyers' work and legal practice can impact the societies they are embedded in. In considering these relationships, this course focusses on two interrelated questions – what kinds of legal professions privilege whom? And how do these paths of entry reproduce different kinds of legal systems?
+ ACCIDENTAL EQUALITY
Can equality be produced by accident? How would we begin to theorize about such equality and what might be its components? If possible, is it useful? If useful, is it sustainable? If not useful, is it dangerous?
This seminar invites students to approach the constructions of equality, fairness and structural change with fresh eyes. Research shows us that inequality is pervasive and that even when we try to create egalitarian social structures, they are disadvantaged prematurely by a variety of prejudicial frameworks. But what about egalitarian structures that happened by accident – for example, a class that is diverse without someone trying intentionally to curate it so, or a gender-equal law firm without any feminist intention – what do we do with the incidental parity that could be produced by these structures? Is this representation and parity the same as equality? Can true equality be produced by accident? Using examples from historical accounts, contemporary ethnography, mythology, and fiction, this course dissects the potential for (and coordinates of) this theoretical premise of “accidental” equality.
+ SOCIO LEGAL STUDIES COLLOQUIUM
This year-long SLS colloquium offers law students a chance to engage with empirical research on socio legal studies by researchers and scholars across the University and discuss its implications for law and legal policy.
Topics for the Colloquium have, in the past, included projects on, among others, immigration policy and romance, the fundamentals of socio-legal theory, organizational clemency and post treatment desirability for guns, gender and global mobility, and the racial subjugation of black men in higher education. The call for papers for each year's Colloquium is released in the late Spring.
+ C.A.S.S.T.E | Critical Approaches to Subjectivities, Solidarities, and Theories of Equality
No matter our positionality – although our positionality is always central – how do we consider our own commitments, contributions, and communities as lawyers and as actors embedded within legal structures? That is the central – and difficult - deliberation that will tie together this seminar’s conversations.
This seminar has three interrelated agendas. The first is to familiarize participants with a range of identity theories that allow for the location of law and legal institutions in more critical context. The second is to think rigorously about law’s justification of these identity categories, their use, and the ways in which they produce “stable” and “non problematic” actors. The third is to think – no, dream sustainably, with intention – about ways in which lawyers can rethink solidarities given these relationships between identity and the law.
The seminar will focus on a range of identity categories and their intersections (including race, non-binary bodies, crip and disabled bodies, decolonized and religiously persecuted identities, and their intersections). The pedagogic value of these comparisons, while recognizing the inherent difference in these categories, is to be able to discuss identity formation and negotiation within the context of a queered – i.e. non-normative – construction. In doing so, it challenges the participants to consider the possibility that to the extent law is dependent/predicated on normativity, its relationship to the non normative will necessarily be unequal.