This compelling episode amplifies the voices of privileged and historically oppressed law students in UVic Law 391 (2021 Class) who demand that a trauma informed legal education should be available to law students everywhere which respects their lived experiences as persons who have experienced individual, collective and cultural traumas.
This episode discusses racism, sterotyping and the harm legal educators and legal institutions can sometimes cause racialized, Black and Indigenous law students - as well as those experiencing mental health challenges.
Published: May 24, 2021
Episode Summary:
This compelling episode amplifies the voices of privileged and historically oppressed law students in UVic Law 391 (2021 Class) who demand that a trauma informed legal education should be available to law students everywhere which respects their lived experiences as persons who have experienced individual, collective and cultural traumas.
Episode Notes:
This episode discusses racism, stereotyping and the harm legal educators and legal institutions can sometimes cause racialized, Black and Indigenous law students - as well as those experiencing mental health challenges.
Myrna McCallum: I’m Myrna McCallum, Métis-Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of trauma-informed lawyering. Welcome back to The Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast. As you know, I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum: trauma-informed lawyering. Becoming a trauma-informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs, and biases; call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy; guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others; and ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career. Your education starts right here, right now. Transcripts for season two have been generously sponsored by the BC Law Foundation.
Okay, if you're a law professor, or a law student, or a future last student, or a lawyer reflecting on your law school experience and how it may have been traumatizing or otherwise mentally or psychologically challenging, we have the perfect show in store for you today. I gathered together a group of courageous and wonderful law students. They made up a class at the University of Victoria law school’s LAW 391 group research project course. We had a conversation about the duty to do better, and what that means particularly for law schools, and for legal educators to reflect a trauma-informed approach to the way in which they deliver legal education and a trauma-informed approach to making space for students who bring a lot of trauma into the classroom. Due to their unique experiences, either as people of colour, or Indigenous people, folks who've known racism, and marginalization, and have been otherwise disadvantaged by the law, and they had some really unique and insightful ideas and advice for all of you. So, have a seat, or take a walk; this is an awesome conversation and I'm so happy I get to share it with you now, especially on this day, which is the one-year anniversary of the Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast.
We have an awesome group of young people who are all law students, and we're going to talk about how trauma may travel into the classroom at law school, and who better to have a conversation about that and give us some ideas and tips to avoid re-triggering and re-traumatizing? And not to put anyone on the spot, but my good friend Marjorie Florestal is also here. What would you like law professors to understand about trauma?
Alexia Manchon: Hi there, my name is Alexia, I use she/her pronouns and I'm a settler in my second year of law school. I think that it's an obstacle to being well in the classroom, and it's an obstacle to learning and engaging the way we want to be. I think sometimes when we bring up these issues with professors, it's almost seen as if we're trying to come up with an excuse to get out of things, and that's not at all the case. We want to be engaging. We want to be learning. We want to be doing it in a way that's not taking away from our well-being as we go through it, and so I think that's the first thing that comes to mind is just like, please give us the benefit of the doubt that we're trying to engage with this properly and truly, and that sometimes trauma gets in the way. We are putting together a bit of a workshop for professors, and we put out a survey to students. A couple of the responses we had were, “I had one thing happened to me in class and then I was out for a week,” you know, “I didn't go to class for a week, and I didn't open up a book for a week.” That’s how debilitating it can be. It really is something that needs to be addressed so that we can engage and learn the way we want to be doing so.
Myrna: Help me understand, or help our listeners understand; is it that when law students come into law school, you're bringing your own traumas, and that law profs needs to be mindful that the whole range of trauma is possible in a classroom, or/and is it that some of the content that law professors are delivering to students could be traumatizing just by their nature?
Lauren Mar: I'm Lauren. I'm a third-year law student and I use the pronouns she and her. I think it's definitely both, Myrna. One thing that comes to mind is oftentimes, profs will talk about clients in a case, or parties in the case that have experienced mental health concerns as if it's an amorphous third-party concept, that no one in the room has ever possibly experienced an episode of that manner, and I think it's really alienating. I think that the idea that profs should recognize that everyone in the room has trauma and brings with them to law school trauma is a huge, huge part of being trauma-informed, and I think lack of that recognition leads to a lot of further harm. Something that this group talks about a lot is acting like . . .always having in your mind that there might be a survivor in the room, there might be someone in the room who's experienced these types of experiences, whether it be if we're talking about a case, or if we're talking about some sort of study, even if we're talking about experiencing addiction and mental health, poor outcomes in the profession as a whole. . .Talking about it completely separate from law school is problematic as well.
Myrna: Anybody else want to contribute to that?
Vyas Saran: I’m Vyas, I’m a third-year student, I’m an arrivant-settler at UVic Law. I think because I grew up with a lot of and around a lot of toxic masculinity, in this conversation, there's always the voice in my head of the person—maybe it was me, years ago—who wants me to be skeptical about this whole conversation. He wants to tell me like, what is well-being? Just man up, shut up, and do your job. There's a lot of things that I can say to that. . .one is, I don't think we can do our jobs without doing this work, without creating trauma-informed spaces, and trying to mitigate trauma in the law school, if not eliminate it. The other thing I was going to say is, in my experience, especially in legal non-profit work, one thing I've learned is that a lot of people come into this job, field, and school because we have trauma. It's the thing that gives us the worldview that makes us want to go to law school—in spite of everything else at law school—to come out of it with the skills to mitigate trauma in our communities. So, it's not something that we just kind of have in our back pocket that gets triggered once in a while at law school, no, it's the reason we came here. As somebody who's been policed, largely for being dark and a migrant, that is one of the reasons why I came to law school. People can talk more to this about being in classes that maybe talk about criminal law content but when I hear about a case, somebody getting pulled over—a dark person, especially a young dark man getting pulled over, or street checks—I know that's happened to me. I think about myself in that. It's not that I don't want you to talk about that, I want you to talk about that properly if you’re a professor. I think people need to disavow this notion that. . .because I've been disavowing myself of this notion, that it's not just like a bone in your body that you want to treat nicely when you're in the law classroom, no, it’s part of the reason you're here. There's a way we can navigate around it, to respect that, and I think honor that in a law classroom.
Myrna: In terms of what it is that professors could do to create a trauma-informed classroom, or trauma-informed curriculum or. . .I don't know if it's content warnings, trigger warnings, the way they emphasize certain cases or the selection of cases that they choose for the purposes of certain courses, I'd be interested in hearing what suggestions you have.
Brittany Scott: Hi, my name is Britt. I'm a 2L at the University of Victoria in the Indigenous law program, and I’m Métis on my mom's side. So, I'm just thinking about one specific prof I've had this year who’s sort of been doing all the right things in my opinion. She started that off before the semester even began; she sent us an email just being like, “I've given you guys the option to do an anonymous survey, and you can tell me anything you think I should know”, and it was like, super broad, it was like, if you have certain traumas you want to let me know about. . . I took that space and was like, “Yeah, here's the shit that I've dealt with, and I'm going to have that in the forefront of my mind in your class.” This particular prof has also been really good at giving us a week's warning when we're going to be talking about really heavy stuff, and like, this is Mental Health law, so every week is pretty heavy, but some weeks are particularly heavy. She's been really good at giving us forewarning, checking in throughout the class, and yeah, I just really appreciate that approach, and sort of being proactive instead of reactive and having to repair damage—I like the focus to be on preventing it.
Myrna: Thanks, Britt. So, what about for those students who maybe don't want to disclose, 'cause we know that there are many among us who do not want to disclose, right, for all kinds of reasons. What, if any, assumptions should law professors be making before they come into the classroom or as they're creating this content for students?
Romi Laskin: My name is Romi. I use she/her pronouns and I’m a 3L settler. Regarding what professors can do that doesn't put the onus on students, that puts the onus on professors to figure out what to do to make their classes trauma-informed so students don't have to come forward and make these hugely personal disclosures, which can throw students off. . .I think the most basic step one is content warnings. Someone had the suggestion as we were talking about this as a group; go through every single thing that you talk about on your class schedule, on your reading list, and think about what topics are in here that could trigger somebody and assume that, like we said before, that there is someone in the room who has had an experience with all these things that can be traumatizing, you know, like over-policing, child apprehension, addiction, mental health issues, Islamophobia like, you know, make a long list and think about what could come up. Step one is content warnings—put those in your reading list, put those in your syllabus. . .but at the same time, while law students strive to do every reading possible, and strive to read your syllabus all the time, they're not always going to read it, so a content warning that's buried in a 20 page syllabus—even though that comes with the best of intentions—that's not enough because people are going to miss it. People need to know before they come into the class that day that this topic is coming up because once it's come up in class, it's almost too late. Some people don't want to be that person who walks out of class when this topic comes up. Like Britt had mentioned before about a week in advance, flagging that this topic is going to come up, letting students know they don't have to be at class, and they're not going to be docked participation grades, or anything else for not attending class. Just making that clear off the bat—I want you to be here, but if there's a reason that you can't be here, no questions asked, that's okay.
Myrna: Thanks for that, Romi. I want to ask, as soon as a class starts, that a professor. . .as they're doing their introduction and kind of welcoming you—this is how the class is going to go, these are the papers, this is the expectations—do you think it's necessary to being a trauma-informed classroom to have professors have a meaningful conversation on that first day to talk about trauma, and to reflect the potential for it in students, and to invite you in to have a conversation with them, privately or otherwise, about how some of the content could be triggering, and the steps that they're going to take to mitigate against that?
Saul Brown: Híkúx̌vs w̓iúƛ[BS1], good morning, my name is Saul Brown and I’m Haíɫzaqv
and Nuu-chah-nulth and I’m a second-year law student at UVic, and I think—to your question, Myrna—that yes, there should be that conversation, but even before that conversation in that first class, I think professors need to reflect on their own positionality, and their own privilege, and where they come from in life because as an Indigenous person, even taking property law is traumatic, and that is completely an erasure of my people's connection to land, the laws that come from that land, the values, the culture, the language, and coming as an Indigenous person from four people who went to residential schools, from that long line of trauma. . .And not being defined by that trauma, but still be very mindful of it, and thinking about how the over-incarceration rates of my people, my relatives, you know, my family members, and how that affects me in every single class it seems like, even with tort liability, we're talking about Indigenous people being wrongfully accused, and how they can't go and seek damages because of some arbitrary distinction in the law. So, thinking through this, profs need to be really mindful and aware of their own positions in this, and how as Indigenous folks, law is an ongoing source of trauma. Like, you could even think of the Indian Act—I'm not in Indian, I'm Haíɫzaqv. So even for us to have that as a statute, as a federal law that defines me and confines me, and I have a little number, a little status number. To me, that is some really harmful stuff, and for people just to think that this is not a thing, or to treat it as “that's just the rule of law” is very harmful in and of itself, so I think that's something that professors really need to think about and reflect on in their own positionality and privilege within the society, and how their interactions with law are probably very different than other folks, or other groups in society.
Myrna: Alexia?
Alexia: Yeah, I just completely second what Saul said. I think I want to add as well, just really explicitly, that law is violence; it's a colonial claim to jurisdiction that comes out of nowhere, and that has a monopoly on violence—be it through police, as Vyas said—through street checks, through incarceration, we’re throwing people into cages and then that state control continues through parole, through criminal records, etc. And so, going into a class and having professors not acknowledge that—sometimes you're just kind of looking around being like, am I missing something, like, what’s happening? And so, yes, I understand we're being professionally trained, we need to go through a contract law class, or criminal law class, but I think at least having that conversation with students would be really validating—especially if those students who have had those experiences with the law, or who have family who’ve had those experiences with the law—and I just think that's something really important to acknowledge in law school.
Myrna: Thanks, Alexia. Marjorie?
Marjorie Florestal: Thank you for this conversation because as I sit here and think about my own positionality as a Black woman—in fact, a Haitian American, so an immigrant—who went to law school, and who has the experiences that you're talking about, I'm thinking about my contracts class. I remember way back in the 90s when I went to law school, the only time Black people showed up in the classroom was in criminal law, and one case in contracts law: Williams v. Walker-Thomas, and it was about a Black woman who was a welfare recipient who bought a stereo, and we had to go over the contract doctrine, and the idea was essentially that she was so stupid and uneducated that she needed the courts to kind of step in and mediate between her and the contract that she signed. And I still, to this day almost 30 years later, remember that conversation in the classroom, and I actually did have to stand up and walk out because it was a white male law professor talking to a white male student, and the suppositions they were making about this Black woman was more than I could bear. I wish I had had the words to be able to talk about what that experience had done for me. The only thing I had was silence, and I knew that I could not be part of that conversation, so my absence, my withdrawal was the only way in which I could speak to it. But now I want to talk about myself as a law professor and having the experience of having to teach the canon because guess what? I went on to become a contracts law professor, and I had to deal with teaching Williams v. Walker-Thomas, and what that experience was like. And as a professor of business classes, right, there is a supposition among my law students that maybe in criminal law it's okay to talk about some of these things, but contracts law is not supposed to be talking about these things, and so you are taking up time as a Black woman about these issues, and so there is this kind of double-edged sword that we walk in taking this path, that I'm very conscious of in my own positionality. Also, we've come to this moment, I think, of reckoning where we have to acknowledge these issues as you've all stated, but also recognizing that there's a confrontation in that classroom as well, right? So, it's not all the students who have your positions, there are also students who feel very much like they're being shamed, and guilted, and somehow their existence made wrong by the fact that some of us raised these issues of equality and fairness, and who gets to appear in the legal canon. So, I just kind of. . .from a law professor’s perspective, want to raise some of the things I have to deal with just walking into the classroom and talking about some of these issues.
Saul: Giasixa, thank you, Marjorie for that, because we do witness this and just yesterday, I walked out of a class 'cause all I had was silence. So, I recognize that, and you know, I told this group that; I walked out 'cause I just couldn't. . .So, I guess my question is, when you have these students—and I encounter these students all the time and they’re fragile, and it's their white fragility or their settler fragility that really makes them defensive, or, you know, guilty—so how do you deal with these students who feel like because of your positionality as a Black woman, as a Black law professor, how then do you engage with these students without catering to the white gaze, and that white fragility, while still covering off what you need to cover off so they can be competent lawyers in the future?
Marjorie: Wow, that is such a hard question Saul, because it's the thing that keeps me up at night, so I guess I will come at it sideways and tell you a little bit about how I experienced it from the student role. I've been a lawyer for almost 30 years, but about 10 years ago I stepped back and became a student myself, so I entered a Jungian psychology program, left the law behind for a while, and I totally lived the student life, and my experience walking into the program was that I was the only person of colour in the entire room, and no one even acknowledged that. One of the things that I had to do for my master’s thesis was write about my individuation process, so in Jungian psychology, it's almost like a spiritual experience. It's sort of reaching towards a higher consciousness, it’s called individuation, but Jung specifically said that Black people have a whole layer of the unconscious less than white people. And so, his presumption was, as a Black woman, I was incapable of attaining that. So how exactly am I supposed to write a thesis that talks about my capacity to do this thing, that the person who invented the theory told me I was incapable of doing? And again, none of my professors in the program even acknowledged that as a reality, and so here I was being asked to do this thing that the theory tells me I'm incapable of doing, and in that moment—because I've now had years of being a litigator and a law professor under my belt—I had words right, and I knew what I needed to do, and I brought a far different experience there. What I did was to educate my professors, the other students on Jung’s abject racism, and how much of a double-bind I was in to have to answer that question, and then I was able to go on and deal with the question myself, and I used storytelling, and I used all of these other skills that I now have available to me. So, an answer to your question, I do that in my classroom; I bring in storytelling, I bring in multiple gazes so that it is not like a single flashlight viewpoint—I'm going to force you to look at it in this way and only this way—I articulate my positionality. I mean, I walk into the room and you can visually see that I'm a Black woman, but I'm very clear about my status as a Haitian-American because that's how I identify more than anything else, my status as a woman married to another woman, my status as a person who survived the Trump administration. . .All of those go into who I am at the moment of teaching these business classes where these issues are not supposed to come up. And so, I do deal with some of the backlash that you talk about, but I also find—maybe it's because I'm teaching Gen Z now and the conversation isn't nearly as new—that I don't face the kind of backlash that one might expect, particularly when I use storytelling as a mechanism for moving forward the conversation.
Saul: Alright, just before we leave this topic; I wish you were prof at UVic and I could take your business class course. I don't want to go into business law at all, but I would definitely take your course, Marjorie, thank you for that.
Myrna: I think, you know, what you all are saying really aligns with a lot of the training that I do around what trauma-informed lawyering looks like, because for any of you who've attended any of those at least two-hour intros that I do, the first thing that I talk about is self-reflection. You cannot offer what you do not have, and so you need to reflect on how your traumas impact the way you attempt to connect with people, or the way you disconnect from people. What are your triggers? What are the things that set you off? You should know what those are. How do you bring up the walls? How do you maintain boundaries, and how do you think about how other people might be experiencing you in certain settings, and are you with safe space for people, like, that's question I put to everybody. I don't think we can offer safety unless we actually possess safety. So, in order to create a safe space, you need to be a safe space. I think for many law professors who are listening to this, if you're thinking, “Oh my God, how do I do this?” It really begins with thinking about yourself, and thinking about how you answer that question, are you a safe space for people? Because if we want law students to feel safe and empowered as they go through law school, it requires a lot of self-reflection, and self-evaluation, and what do you know, and what are your sources of knowledge around certain issues, and I think it's quite the challenge if you are, for example, white, and privileged, and you haven't seen the world through any other lens, how would you know? I think Saul’s feedback and response was really quite profound. In addition to self-awareness, and thinking about content warnings, and thinking about the lived experiences of people who are not like you, where do you think law professors can go to begin to get the education that they don't have, or they didn't even know that they needed to do their job in a way that is reflective of the diversity, and the diverse traumas that might come into their classrooms?
Dustin Fox: Itommikskonatooni ayo niisokowa. Niistonakohk Oonisstayakopi[BS2]. Good morning, Myrna and Marjorie, thanks for doing this. I’m a Blackfoot 2L student, my name is Dustin Fox, at UVic law, I’ve got a couple classmates in here with me. But yeah, just to your question, I guess in the classroom what I mostly kind of reflect on is like, the philosophical implications of law, and how being an Indigenous student. . .how these philosophies are in total contradiction with each other. And so, where I get my learning. . . I grew up in southern Alberta just to contextualize it a bit, and so I went to school at the University of Lethbridge, where I took a couple classes from Leroy Little Bear, who happens to be my cousin. We had him in our class a couple weeks ago and he was talking about his jagged worldviews, kind of. . .his paper, actually, and I see that almost in every class, right? And I heard John Borrows in one of his classes say, “Colonization is the water we swim in, and you don't realize it until you start to talk about it.” If we're going to talk about colonization, then we have to talk about the erasure of Indigenous philosophy. If that philosophy is continuing to be erased, especially in the classroom, then it’s futile, especially to Indigenous students like Saul and I, and a lot of our classmates. It speaks to Blackfoot philosophy a little more where these professors don't. . . like if they understood one concept of Indigenous philosophy, is “flux”. So, everything is in movement, everything's changing all the time, yet in law, everything is kind of treated as static, and very instructional, and very templative, like if like you apply this template to a lot of things that just isn't right, that just doesn't supplement the Indigenous philosophy. . .but that is also the colonization at work, right? And it’s. . .I see it's very paradoxical because you don't really understand you're in the meat grinder until someone points it out, right? It's very profound to me that this Indigenous philosophy that isn't narrow at all would only be expensive to all professors, even teaching behaviors could be supplemented through an idea of Indigenous thought. That is another learning process on its own, but at the same time, as we continue to learn these different philosophies, I think professors will only learn more instead of being restricted to the Western law.
Myrna: Thanks for that, Dustin. Alexia?
Alexia: Yeah, I think just in response to your question about sources, and where to find that information, listen to Dustin, listen to Saul, right? Like, you don't have to go far. There are some incredible students in these classes who've spent more time in law school thinking about these questions than doing actual law readings, right? Not to say that that's what you guys are doing—they're working very hard—I'll speak for myself when I say that, that you know, I think is a delicate balance of not putting the onus on students to do that work, but I think that professors can create that space and really put time, and energy, and thoughtfulness into their relationships with students in a way that actually does make students want to speak to them and want to have those conversations. I think that Saul talked about white fragility, like, making sure to check that, think about those reactions. If a student has the courage to come to you and give you feedback, stop and think about it before you do anything, and before you speak back, and before you defend yourself. I think that that is. . .That's just like one first source of. . .we're here, we have these ideas, we have these suggestions, please listen to us, and please make it a space that we want to share these things with you.
Myrna: Thank you. Jessica?
Jessica Mayhew: Hi, I’m Jessica. I'm in 3rd year in the JD Program at UVic Law. I’m Métis on my mom’s side from Treaty 8 territory, and I'm currently living in sovereign Nuxalk territory. I think one thing to keep in mind is that the systemic racism and white supremacy that states are founded on is also what the institutions are founded on. The harm that we experience as students, I've heard many times professors express that they've experienced the same harms, and so what I think professors need to be aware of is like. . .one question to ask in addition to reflecting on positionality is like, how am I replicating the harms that I suffered, and like, how do I stop that cycle? I think one thing that often people might not think of is like, it's embedded in the structure of the class, and just because you've gone to a class in your time as a student where it's like, okay we need to cover all this material—do we actually need to cover all this material? Is doing the final exam where students are regurgitating information and not using critical thought the way to think about these issues, or are there other things that I can bring to this from my experience that could possibly stop the cycle of harm, or at least create a safer space for students to. . .like Alexia said, bring things up, because every single class of students is going to be full of people with different experiences, and I think one of the issues with school too is the idea that there's the hierarchy of the professor and the students, and that students don't have experiences they’re bringing to the table that would inform the class, which is one of the reasons that this class that we’re in now was created. . .the idea to make a space where we can learn from our peers, and like actually approach the law in a way where we can discuss things that isn't going to cause us harm, and I'm thankful to John Borrows for agreeing to supervise this class because it has been a space, for me at least, where we can talk about these things without it being super harmful every day. Like just, I guess, rethinking the structure itself as a microcosm of the law.
Myrna: Thanks for that. Romi?
Romi: I just want to piggyback off what other people have said and thinking back to Marjorie’s prior question of. . .how do we walk this fine line between some students who are going to be upset that you're having these conversations, and what I think what we're hearing is for many students, these conversations are essential. If we don't have them, harm is being perpetuated against them. And like Jess said, that’s the continuation of harms that are being perpetuated by the state. So, you might have to decide which students am I prioritizing? It’s not. . .we would love the idea of creating a classroom where every single person feels safe, and every single person feels valued, and every person feels completely like that's their space to be in. The reality is, that's really hard to accomplish because of the spectrum of viewpoints and experiences. But as professors, and as classmates as well, we have to think about whose safety we are prioritizing. Are we prioritizing the safety of people who essentially have been safe for generations and generations, or are prioritizing the safety of people who have been oppressed, and have been subjected to state violence and now are coming to the school as a way to fight back against that? So, if you have to choose, which side are you on?
Vyas: Vyas, again. I was also going to add that I use he/him pronouns. So to piggyback on what everybody is saying, I sometimes imagine who is listening to this, and maybe they hear all our voices and think about like, “Oh, these people are asking for special treatment. It's all these kids talking about trauma, and how we want our experiences validated.” They probably come to the conclusion that these are the students who need coddling. And I just want to say, through this class, and through the friendships I made with my classmates prior to this, this is the toughest group of students at UVic Law, and that's not just because we've all had to experience stuff in the past and we are able to talk about it. I also met a lot of people here through really, really vigorous and physically demanding direct action that a lot of other people at this law school were not a part of, including professors. So, of all the notions to disavow yourself of, this is the toughest group of bastards at this law school. And if you’re a professor listening to this at another law school, the people who are bringing up these issues, the people who are leaving the class 'cause they can’t handle a topic—they can handle it, they've had to handle it because they’ve lived it, and everybody else is denying that reality of it, and acting as if it's an abstract concept, like it's a cartoon. It’s like no, I was the guy in the car, or my friend was the person whose house was raided or whose mom was deported. We're tougher than you, and we also pay all this money to be in this classroom; we want to f*ckin’ learn, so figure it out.
Myrna: That's powerful, thank you. I haven't heard from Will.
Will O’Hanley: I’m Will, I’m a third-year law student and teaching assistant at UVic. I think a lot of what people have been saying. . .the last few people have who spoken are reminding me of something that I think about a lot, which is just, like, the value of play for learning, and the value of community. I think there are lots of classes where it's possible to just like, you don't really go or you don't really pay attention, you read your friends notes for a couple of days before the final, and you pass, and it's fine. That's a class where people are just kind of checked out and you never needed to be giving lectures in the first place, and I think this class, this study group that we've been doing together is like, is an example of. . .you can do better things with people's time, right?
The point to me, and the good learning experiences that I've had are environments where you can really kick ideas around, you can voice things that you aren't really sure about, you can just talk to people, and you add depth to whatever concept you're supposed to be learning. I think so much of the time, a good learning experience is based on a feeling of like, a freedom to experiment.
Marjorie talked earlier about shame, and I think that's such a good thing to bring up. I know Marjorie was talking about, you know, some people will feel kind of challenged by talking about trauma, they’ll feel shamed, and they’ll feel attacked, but I think there's also. . .on the other side for a lot of people experiencing trauma, that manifests as shame, and I think shame is just the worst poison to learning. This kind of ties together with this fear we have of being unprofessional and feeling like we should leave certain things at home. You know, the same basic sickness that the law itself has—that law school should be this sober place that's just for rational thinking and like, if you brought your heart to school with you, you're doing something wrong, I think this is kind of what I hear and like what Vyas is saying. . .that like, no, I think that's the best thing you could possibly do. I think one of the big points for me of the entire trauma-informed education thing is creating a space where that's possible, right, where people do feel like they can show up for class and all of that just emerges out of a sense of safety, and that's what we're trying to create.
Myrna: You ahouldn't have to abandon a part of yourself for the purposes of getting a legal education.
Marjorie: I wanted to piggyback off what Will said. Thinking about the emotions—there are a lot of emotions in that classroom—and I think for most of your professors, and maybe this sounds untrue to you, but the truth of the matter is, there's love in that room. I love my students in ways that I wasn't prepared for. I want you all to do well so desperately. As I move towards retirement, I recognize that if I don't pass on everything that I've learned, I've essentially wasted my time, and so it becomes very important for me to share knowledge and experience in all of that exchange with my students, and I feel a lot of that pressure. I want to say that there’s shame in the room. So as I was talking, I was thinking about the shame that I experienced as a law professor when I got it wrong, and three moments maybe came to mind for me. One is an experience I'll never forget; I was teaching European Union law of all things and I had not been prepared. I had a Turkish law student and German student in my class, and I had not been preparing myself, because I'm an American, that there would be something coming up in the room, and it was having students really say things about a student from another ethnicity that I would have been prepared for if they had been saying that about Black students in the US. So the ways in which I was primed to sort of stand in for Black/white issues, I was not ready to stand in for Turkish/German issues and I failed. My student was harmed and at the end of that class, I remember going up to the student and apologizing for my failure. It was a moment where I sort of recognized that I needed to do better, have a better kind of a plan for how to deal with those issues. And so, as I'm talking about that, I'm just reflecting on. . .Often your professors in the room get it wrong and it lives inside of us all of the time. I want you to know that; we do recognize when we fail. I talk about the experience of my Contracts professor failing, I still remember that moment and I have to tell you, I have more compassion for him these days than I did then, because of the moments I've failed.
Another moment that I can remember is when a Contracts student came to my office hours —this was after midterms—and the student was so pained and started crying, everything coming out and I had no words and no capacity to hold that, and I remember just saying, “Let's talk about contracts”, right? Because I didn't know how to talk about all of the other things going on in that person's life, and frankly, as lawyers, we’re not therapists and could probably do much more harm trying to pretend to be, but that was another moment of shame that sort of woke me up to the work that I needed to do within myself because what law school did to me, and law practice (I practiced for 10 years before I became an academic). . .What those two things did to me was absolutely divorce my head from my heart, and I had to find my way back by doing a lot of outside work. So to bring this to a close, and I don't quite know how, but as I'm listening to some of the emotions that are coming up for all of you as students, I want you to know that there's a resonance for many of us as your professors. What we're trying desperately to do is to break through that wall because we absolutely care about you, and we absolutely want you to do well, and often when we fail, it's because we define doing well as training you to “think like a lawyer” which is a mode of thinking that we sometimes define as being divorced from the heart. I've now come to understand that thinking like a lawyer is a way of deductive and inductive reasoning, and a use of precedent, and all of those forms are what some of you have called templates. What we need to do is to not divorce that from the emotions— That's what we need to all get better at, and many of us are trying.
Myrna: Thanks, Marjorie. Nicole?
Nicole Freeman: I’m Nicole, I’m a 3L. Perhaps my comment will seem a little bit insensitive after Marjorie—it came to me before Will spoke. I'm sure there are many law professors like Marjorie who care quite a bit, but I was thinking about the ones who may be listening and thinking that this is a lot of work for them to do to change their approach to instructing this course that they maybe haven't changed for years, but I just kinda think that an entire area of law can change with one Supreme Court decision, so I feel like it's probably not that much work to add content warnings, or to be more mindful, so I don't think the argument that it's a lot of work is a valid excuse.
Myrna: Good point, Nicole, and it brings me to my next question: where there are professors who refuse to consider the traumas that either they are bringing into the classroom, or that other students are bringing into the classroom, what is the potential harm? We're talking about you all, and you’re a whole new beautiful generation, what is the potential harm? I've heard some of you say you get up and you walk out of class, that it's really hard to come back into the classroom, hard to feel. . .or even impossible to feel safe in that environment.
Sofia Sherrin: Hi Myrna, thank you. My name is Sofia, I use she/her pronouns and I'm a 3L. I think we think a lot about the harms that come immediately in the classroom in terms of people having to walk out, people not taking in the content, people feeling disillusioned with law school and disconnected from law school in general, but I also just wanted to bring in that this is a profession that has incredibly high rates of mental illness and substance abuse to a tremendous degree, and this perpetuation of a system where we're traumatized, and trying to desensitize ourselves from the material, and take a step back from the material, and not being able to engage in it with a safe way, is part of what's creating this profession where so many people are relying on toxic substance abuse, and are so, so depressed and using terrible coping mechanisms. So it's not just right now while we're in law school, this really has implications for the rest of our lives and for how we interact with our coworkers and our clients for the rest of our careers.
Myrna: Well, and implications for those who end up making up the profession, right? So, then we repeat these really horrible patterns that currently exist.
Jess: It seeps into every single class and you end up being the only person saying the same thing over, and over, and over again, and disassociating, and it comes to a certain point where you're like, “I have to tell 500 years of history to come even close to the point that I'm trying to make,” and it does get to the point where it's like, “Why am I going to class?” I was talking with a friend the other day and if I'm gonna get mad, why don’t I just read this at home and not go to class? If there are classes that are 100% exams, then what happened for me is by the time I’m in third year, I’m taking the classes with 100% exams so that I don't have to go to class and experience this every single day, and for me, I figured out the template, so I'm just applying that template to every single exam and like. . .not even engaging with anything because I don't need to because I don't feel like I'm actually learning anything in these spaces. I tried to go to class, like, every single semester, I've given it a chance at the start and without fail, almost every single class has given me that experience where I’m like, this is not worth it. Like, it's not worth it to be here. There were two classes in one day where people weren't aware that they were bringing up really heavy, sensitive topics. . .There has to be a different way to go about this, because like Nicole said, everything can change with one Supreme Court decision. So like, really, do you need to go over 100 cases? And like, really prioritizing as a professor what assignments are asking, because often I feel like some of the most problematic things that have happened in class have been from the assignments offered by the professor, and the way that that discussion is structured so that students do have an entire class of non-Indigenous students discussing the pros and cons of fiduciary duty that's like, imposed on Indigenous peoples.
Myrna: That was great, Jessica. Vyas?
Vyas: Real quick, I really appreciated Sofia’s point about how in the long term, lawyers, face high rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse, everything horrible, but they say it with a smile on their face when they talk about that in class—most of them do. They bring it up as a glamorous part of the role and if you can’t handle it, you're not cool. I don't really know how to close off that point, but that is just kind of endemic in the law school, and you kind of look around at the classroom at your peers, and they are all nodding when you hear that, because of what they see on TV and whatever law TV shows to watch to get in there.
Myrna: Who do we have next? Lauren?
Lauren: Yeah, I think people have spoken a lot about how these harms that we experience in the classroom affect the people that have been harmed, and I think that is a really excellent point for our profs to keep in mind, but I think one of the other things too is that when you don't step in when someone—a student—has brought up a view that's problematic, and maybe not with ill-intent, but maybe ignores systemic racism, because that's not something that they have had to grapple with in the way they walk through the world. . .By not addressing that comment, you embolden that view. You validate it, and then it becomes someone else's problem, and they go out into practice, and no one has challenged that view, and then it becomes the problem of. . .if they’re a prosecutor, the person on trial. It becomes the problem of all the people that they interact with in the workplace, that they don't understand how these systems are operating at the disadvantage of some. I think that amazing profs like Marjorie do a great job of bringing that up., and Marjorie, when you speak of moments that keep you up at night and your mistakes. . . you're trying! Everyone’s gonna make mistakes, but what I don't see sometimes is older, white, male professors trying, and trying to speak power-to-power to these white folks—and primarily I will say white dudes—that show up in class. . .and I've seen racialized profs try to speak to these issues and it falls on deaf ears. What I would like to see is profs—particularly those with tenure—that, for lack of better words, sticking their necks out on an issue like systemic racism is not going to get them in hot water. They are not going to be met with the kind of heat or derision that I feel like sometimes folks of colour—even in positions of power like a prof—are met with from students in the room. I get frustrated when I don't see them addressing it, and even in this conversation I feel like— to profs listening to this that might feel like we're putting them on blast— it’s an act of love. Like, we know that our profs are amazing, capable people. We know that they care, they wouldn’t teach us if they didn't, or at least I hope they wouldn't, and so us trying to call them into this conversation about being trauma-informed, about making it easier for folks to show up into these conversations, but then also sending out professionals into the world that will improve the practice is our act of love to you. It’s us turning around and thanking you for all the work that you do and saying, “We know that you're capable of being better, so here are some things that you can think of.” I think that oftentimes, we think about this with the medical profession, right, like you can treat the symptoms after it's already occurred, or you can try to get ahead of the cause, and I think that process in law schools have a really good opportunity to try and alleviate some of these issues we see in the profession over, and over, and over by just stepping in, or if you don't feel comfortable in the moment stepping in, addressing it maybe after the fact, something like that—calling people into conversations and flagging that some things might be problematic, or flagging that, “You know what, I didn't do a great job there, but I know that and I hope you're okay, and if you need something from me, please ask.” Like, just those sorts of conversations, I think, would make a world of difference because it isn't just isolated to the law school, it flows out into the profession both what behavior of yours is going to be acceptable, and what you can ask from those around you as well.
Myrna: Vyas?
Vyas: To add on to what Lauren's been bringing up about people around us. . .There's a lot of people in our classrooms who are going to be judges, and prosecutors, and it's not just about decisions they’re going to make in five years, 10 years, whatever—some people are going to be working at the DOJ (Department of Justice) in the summer after 1L. Some people are going to clerking right after law school. People who I don't trust with my car are going to be writing decisions for appellate courts, basically, for lazy judges. Like, I don't trust you and I'm seeing you act in the classroom like. . .that's just what was shouting out to me.
The other thing that has been going on in this conversation, talking about the workload that maybe our demands put on to professors—you don't have to be therapists. You don't have to. . .it's not a lot of work, I think, to be able to create a safe classroom. I trust everybody in this class that we have together to be able to do that at this point, none of my friends here are therapists, so I don't see the problem. It's just a novel thing right now, it's just new. It's a new issue, and so there are new types of ways of thinking. You have to rewire your brain, it's not that you have to go do another degree like, you can be a better law professor by taking our advice. We've had to learn this because we've had to live it also. So, for any professor listening to that, I don't buy that excuse like. . . it's right there, you just can't see it right now.
Myrna: Saul?
Saul: Yeah, I really agree with everything that's been said and I just want to say like, there is this power dynamic in the classroom but oftentimes, we forget how powerful we are as students, and the duty and responsibilities we have to the next generation of law students and little law babies coming through, and so reclaiming that space, you know, really owning that—like this—and standing in our truth, no matter how hard it might be to stand in that truth, when we're dealing with trauma and being trauma-informed, and I think there's a lot of power in being a truth-teller. There's a lot of power in that, like Myrna, to me, you’re a truth teller, right? And I don't want to fangirl over you right now on your podcast, but you are, you’re a truth teller and Marjorie, you spoke about your responsibility to pass on all your knowledge onto the next generation, so we can break these harmful cycles that do perpetuate violence and harm. So that's why I think it's all about here and as students, what we have—and to be Vyas’ point and Sofia’s point—we have this duty and responsibility to do better, to hold you accountable in a good way, and invite you in. I think that's what we're talking about here is. . .I don't want to make it like, you know, we’re these passive people who come into your classroom, and who are not gonna say anything, and hold you accountable as that next generation of people who have a positive duty. As an Indigenous person who is the first in my family to go to law school, I have a positive duty and obligation on myself to make sure that the next young person who wants to come to law school from my family has it better, and doesn't get as harme, or has a better experience and can actually learn, and learn vibrantly and healthily in a space that will respect them as an Indigenous person. So, I just wanted to really make that point about, you know, us reclaiming our power and putting the onus back on the law profs to do better by standing in our truth, and not having any shame about it either, and not saying, “Oh, this is something we don't talk about in law.” But yes, this is something we need to talk about in law to practice law, and not just colonial law, not just the common law, but Indigenous law and other forms of law, and the way we practice law outside of the common law.
Myrna: Britt?
Britt: This may be a bit of a tangent, but I'm just thinking about the power of community and like. . .a lot of times when we've had really traumatic days at law school, or we knew we were going to be talking about residential schools in a really problematic and unsafe way, it was us, it was the students, it was Indigenous law students specifically who were like, “Okay, here's the game plan. We're going to meet here after class, we're going to have food, we're going to smudge.” Yeah, like, just the value of community. It doesn't have to be an “us-vs-them” with the profs. They are invited to that community too, but there also has to be like. . .They have to recognize their space in the community, and when we invite them in, like. . .we've received a bit of pushback and profs saying they don't feel safe having this conversation with us, and I just think that's so disappointing. We're trying to invite them in and sort of being met with like, “No, I don't want to hear it.” So, I think a way that profs can do better is to just honor the community that we've created, and that we're inviting them in to.
Myrna: I don't think that's a tangent at all, Britt, I'm glad that you brought that up because I was thinking as I was listening to all of your beautiful perspectives, I was thinking about how, you know, we've been talking about the duties, or responsibilities, or obligations on the individual professor—what they can do in the classroom. But what can law schools do to support professors who need and want trauma-informed training, understanding awareness that could bring it into the classroom? I want to put that question to you, and I think that's a great last question to have as we start to close this conversation, but the other piece that I also want you to think about—further to Britt’s comment, how do we make space for collective care within the law school? How do we care for each other? Sofia?
Sofia: Just a really quick point is that we've seen the university bring in speakers such as yourself to talk about trauma-informed practice for the students, but we would love to see the university bring in anti-oppression workshops, trauma-informed practice workshops—all sorts of education like that for the faculty specifically. I know that we have some amazing profs who are there at the workshops for the students, and who are doing the work, but if we could have those workshops being funded for the faculty, with a pressure for the faculty to attend, and with the focus specifically on legal education and how they can do better, I think that would make a world of difference institutionally, because then it wouldn't just be the individual professors that are trying hard on their own, it would be an institutional change.
Myrna: Good point, and we're looking at institutional change. . .like, that's the whole point. That's the whole point of this podcast—The Trauma-Informed Lawyer—is to change the institution, to change the profession, to think about the ways we are traumatized by the work we do because we blindly uphold the status quo, or we buy into this idea that we can compartmentalise and leave our traumas at home, or that our work is not traumatizing us—yet every day, it is, and it's evident when we're drinking a lot, or taking drugs, or doing random things that don't align with our values. Alexia?
Alexia: Just to second what Sofia is saying, buy maybe put it a little more bluntly. . . put your money where your mouth is. You know? Like, trauma-informed is this buzzword that's been going around a lot and the school, and a lot of schools, love to talk about how much they take it seriously, and exactly what Sofia was saying of like, maybe they're going to try and create a course for it, and then there's all this advertising that goes out, and then we come to the school expecting that, and then not being in those good spaces. I think at the school level, yes, it's gonna take money because it's going to take training, it’s gonna take anti-oppression training, going to potentially take some history lessons for some profs if I'm very honest. That needs to happen, and it is especially necessary if they're going to start using that language, and if they're going to start presenting their schools in that manner, that means that they have to have put time in professors, in administration, being able to actually speak to those things and create those spaces.
I also think that there needs to be more transparency about how decisions are made at the administrative level. There have been various things coming up in our school, and we've tried to give feedback, and we don't know who to, and who sits on what committee, and just having more active student representation in those spaces, and trusting us that we are all adults who have lots of experiences to bring to the table and things to offer, and then to pay students to do that work when they are doing that work. The fact that we're paying to take these classes, and then we're paying to educate professors is a lot. And so yeah, it's gonna take money, like solving a lot of issues, and they just need to put it up, I think.
Myrna: Britt says in the chat, “I don't want “trauma-informed” to become the new “reconciliation” buzzword. Do you want to comment on that, Britt?
Britt: Sure. So yeah, I've been seeing that word come up more and more often and like, while it gives me optimism, at the same time, I'm skeptical, right? I remember when we first started hearing about reconciliation, it was like, “Yeah, this sounds awesome!” And then very quickly, it just became another thing to insert into speeches like people insert land acknowledgements and don't really. . .It’s just pandering, it's all optics, right? And I see people talking about being trauma-informed, but they are the same people perpetuating the harm. There’s like a dissonance there I guess, and I ask people like that to really reflect on what you're saying, and what your actions are.
Myrna: That's a really good point. So just in closing folks, any final comments, final hopes, wishes, dreams you want to put in the universe? Saul?
Saul: Yeah, as I think about this and this institutional transformation that we're collectively envisioning here on this podcast, I think about how BIPOC communities have always taken care of each other. In fact, that's how we survived the atrocities at the hands of these same institutions. We have these ways of community aid and taking care of each other that we use in law school—this class is one of them. In our case, in the Haíɫzaqv case, we have a potlatch that's governed by our laws, and we often invite people—outsiders—outside the community, into our sacred space to ceremony with us, to take care, to as you say, build relationship. But we only do that to those people who deem themselves worthy, to those types of people who we want to share those sacred spaces with, those spaces of taking care of each other. So to these institutions, to these law profs, these law deans: be the type of person who we would invite into our big house for a potlatch. Be the type of relation that we would invite into ceremony, and I think that's when we'll start to see some real change happen.
Myrna: Vyas?
Vyas: Saul brought up a really good point there, and I just want to give credit and acknowledge, but not glamorize, what happened to make this class happen. Jessica had to fight with administration to make this class happen. Saul talked about how we know how to show each other care, and we come together, and that's how we survive, but we had to struggle to even just make this class. It wasn't sanctioned by the university off the bat, there was pushback. We got help from some key people to do that, but it wasn't easy. So, think about that, and don't glamourize that. We shouldn't have to struggle to be able to live together, and that's what we're trying to do here. We're creating some beautiful things here and we're doing something really good for the law school by pushing up against it. We shouldn't have to push up against it to do it.
The other point I wanted to make is that I often hear, when we talk about or anticipate hearing that the professors who do this harm, or all the old white male professors, it's not. . .usually when I have those classes, just in my experience, I've already checked out of that class. I'm not thinking about what their role in it is, I already know what their role in it is, no matter what they say. But when it's a racialized prof, that's when I get hooked in, and I really think I'm going to be in a safe space, but so often racialized professors just perpetuate the same things but using different language, and almost creating an image of a safe space and it turns out to just be as unsafe as all the other ones. If you’re a racialized prof listening to this; I understand why you're doing that, because I perpetuate whiteness, and anti-Blackness, and colonialism all the time because I've been colonized too. I understand the pressure. I understand that it's not easy to just let go of all that, especially if you're a law professor in the colonial law, but just because you have had experiences like ours doesn't automatically mean that you're creating a safe space.
Those are the profs that disappoint me the most. Some of the profs at UVic who have given me the most grief about having to miss classes that were decently traumatic to me. . .I don't really know how to close that off, but this isn't just about all the white male profs. This is about all law profs, and I understand why that happens, we totally do, but that's. . . it's not enough. I'm sure they know that.
Myrna: Sounds like it's even more harmful when it comes from someone you don't expect it to come from, and then you have to also then think about how they got there, and the kinds of compromises they've had to make to stay in that environment, and to succeed in that environment. Marjorie?
Marjorie: Oh, I'm still taking that one in, that one hit really to the bone. But thank you for that, it feels like an important wake-up call.
Myrna: Thank you all for trusting me, and being part of this really critical conversation that just needed to be had and needs to be heard across the world, and that's exactly what's going to happen. It will be heard across the world, so thank you all very much.
Myrna: Well, there you have it folks. Another awesome episode with some pretty insightful and self-aware guests. Remember these voices that you've heard here today because they are the future of this legal profession. One day they will be our judges, and our chief judges, maybe even one day our Minister of Justice, and maybe even a Supreme Court Justice.
Thanks so much for tuning in. Please leave a rating and review if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts. If you want to give me any feedback, you can find me on Instagram @thetraumainformedlawyer, as well as Twitter @theTILpodcast. Until next time, take care everyone. This episode was recorded on the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [Squamish], səl̓ilwətaɁɬ [Tsleil-Waututh], and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam] people.
[BS1]Just spoke with Saul and this is the correct spelling for what he said in his language!
[BS2]Spoke with Dustin and this is the correct spelling of what he said in his Blackfoot intro!