Technology Pedagogy Duo 

Two articles about fresh pedagogical approaches to issues at the intersection of law and technology, all available for free.

Disrupting Data Cartels by Editing Wikipedia (forthcoming 2023)

Contemporary legal citation methods harm marginalized people. Teaching law students how to edit Wikipedia builds their lawyering skills and creates an alternative to dangerous data cartels. With Eun Hee Han + Jonah Perlin. (25 Yale J. L. & Tech. (forthcoming 2023).

The digital public square is often defined by legal memoranda, motions, briefs, and opinions. As lawyers are taught from their first day of law school, these genres of legal communication rely on authority. Finding that authority often depends on a duopoly of for-profit legal research resources: Westlaw and Lexis. While contemporary legal practice depends on these databases, they are far from ethically neutral. Not only are these “data cartels” expensive—creating significant access to justice challenges—they also are controlled by parent companies that profit by providing information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is used to surveil, arrest, and deport immigrants, creating a sense of ethical unease in the colloquial sense. Not only that, these services create potential problems for attorneys’ formal ethical duties of confidentiality and conflicts of interest. One way to make legal research (and by extension, legal practice) more publicly and ethically accessible is to find ways to increase information options. But there are few viable alternatives unless the public creates them.

Wikipedia has the power to disrupt these data cartels and increase public access to legal information. The non-profit, publicly-funded encyclopedia that anyone can edit is already the silent first stop for many legal researchers, including judges, lawyers, and the public. With expert editing by law students, who are already entrusted to moderate legal academic discourse through law journals, Wikipedia could become much more than a first step. This Essay builds on the scholarly literature and multiple years of classroom experience to suggest that law students are particularly well-positioned to transform Wikipedia into an ethical competitor to Westlaw and Lexis. Further, teaching law students how to use and maintain Wikipedia sidesteps both colloquial and formal ethical issues with these data cartels and produces concrete benefits for students: editing creates substantive opportunities to investigate different genres of legal writing, allows integration of students’ legal research and writing skills into practice, instills ethical service obligations, and provides professional identity formation opportunities during students’ early years. With proper training, law students can make significant and meaningful contributions to the accessibility of legal knowledge by creating and editing Wikipedia articles that are free, accurate, and ethical sources of that knowledge.

Teaching Doctrine for Justice Readiness (2022)

Teaching legal doctrine through a social justice lens in clinical courses can be a powerful way to build students’ justice readiness. 29 Clinical L. Rev. 1 (forthcoming 2022)

Clinics strive to teach students lawyering skills. But clinics should also teach students how to use those skills to confront injustice and promote justice, an approach Jane Aiken refers to as “justice readiness.” Casework for clients presents many opportunities for students to become justice ready, but not all matters do so equally. Clinics come with built-in limitations. Some matters involve injustices in one area of law while leaving others untouched. And others don’t require creative advocacy for justice. Casework remains a powerful driver of justice readiness, but it cannot do the job alone.

Teaching students doctrine through a social justice lens can bridge the justice readiness gap. This Essay introduces two new pedagogical approaches cultivated within Georgetown’s new Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic that do just that: Doctrine x Social Justice and Deep Dives. Doctrine x Social Justice uses cutting-edge social justice case studies that illustrate themes of injustice and creatively explore lawyers’ bending the law toward justice to teach underlying doctrine in nine substantive areas of intellectual property law and information policy, setting students up to observe themes of (in)justice within the field. And Deep Dives empower students to create their own Doctrine x Social Justice sessions by using current issues of law and policy to explore underlying doctrine. Together, these approaches provide a fresh way of teaching doctrine for justice readiness.