Those Who Teach Must Also Do: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Legal Education and the Canadian Armed Forces
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Abstract
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives have become a priority for many organizations within Canada. In legal academia it has become both a procedural and substantive imperative, as it grapples with meaningful integration of these considerations, and appropriate adaptation to current social and technological challenges. This paper sketches selected considerations in implementing DE&I within legal education, and transplants them into Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) engagements with DE&I implementation, with a focus on the transmission of legal norms and values in a non-legal environment and teaching context, using an explicitly socio-legal orientation. Drawing from legal education literature highlighting the challenges and opportunities within the university, and key insights regarding DE&I implementation’s history and current developments within the CAF derived by scholars in a themed-2020 conference, I argue that a process of translation and adaptation of legal education practices and engagement with DE&I into the CAF context will provide valuable insights into both communities of practice and transform and be transformed in the process, in particular with developing key concepts, solidifying abstract concepts and challenges, leveraging case study and simulation techniques, exploiting remote and hybrid pedagogical tools, and furthering legal education engagement outside the academy.
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References
Various definitions exist for these terms. For the purposes of this paper they are not critical as the analysis is upon implementations and challenges, rather than necessarily the substance of EDI. See e.g. McGill University, “Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) Strategic Plan 2020-2025” (29 April 2022), online: <https://www.mcgill.ca/equity/files/equity/mcgill_strategic_edi_plan_2020-20251.pdf> at 3 for example definitions. A short extract is reproduced below for a basic orientation.
Law Society of Ontario, “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” (24 April 2022), online: <https://lso.ca/about-lso/initiatives/edi>.
See e.g. McGill University, supra note 1; McGill University Faculty of Law, “Diversity and Inclusion” (29 April 2022), online: <https://www.mcgill.ca/law/about/diversity-and-inclusion>.
Chief of Defence Staff, Canadian Armed Forces Diversity Strategy (Ottawa: Directorate of Human Rights and Diversity, 2016).
See Canada, “Conversation on Defence Ethics: a Defence Team Learning Event” (3 December 2021), online: <https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/benefits-military/defence-ethics/prof-dev-day-ethics.html>.
See e.g. Duncan Kennedy, “Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy” in David Kairys, ed, The Politics of Law, 2nd ed., (New York: Pantheon Book, 1990) at 41-47; Brenna Bhandar, “Always on the Defence: The Myth of Universality and the Persistence of Privilege in Legal Education” (2002) 14 Can J Women L 341 (critiques of the claimed objective neutrality of law).
Alistar D Edgar, Rupinder Mangat & Bessma Momani, eds, Strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces Through Diversity and Inclusion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
Alan Okros, “Introspection on Diversity in the Canadian Armed Forces” in Edgar, Mangat & Momani, ibid, 153 at 163-165.
McGill University, supra note 1 at 3.
Supra note 6 at 46-47.
“Changing the Rules” (Annie Macdonald Langstaff Workshop delivered by Esmeralda Thornhill at the Faculty of Law, McGill University, 26 January 2022) [Recording available, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism].
James Boyd White, Expectation to Experience: Essays on Law and Legal Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, (1999) at 18-21.
Martha Nussbaum, “Cultivating Humanity in Legal Education” (2003) 70:1 U Chicago L Rev 265.
Francis A. Allen, “Humanistic Legal Education: The Quiet Crisis” in Neil Gold, ed, Essays on Legal Education: Centre for Studies in Canadian Legal Education (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982) 9.
Desmond Manderson & Sarah Turner, “Coffee House: Habitus and Performance among Law Students” (2006) 31:3 Law & Soc Inquiry 649.
Supra note 4.
See Assistant Deputy Minister (Review Services), “Evaluation of Diversity and Inclusion (Defence Team Management Program)” (National Defence, September 2020), online: <https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/dnd-mdn/documents/reports/2019/report-1258-3-027-en.pdf> at vi-vii.
See e.g. House of Commons, Improving Diversity and Inclusion in the Canadian Armed Forces: Standing Committee on National Defence (June 2019) (Chair: Stephen Fuhr), online: <https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/NDDN/Reports/RP10573700/nddnrp17/nddnrp17-e.pdf> at 52.
See James Elkins, “Rites of Passage: Law Students Telling Their Lives” (1985) 35 J Leg Educ 27.
Christian Leuprecht, “Demographic Imperatives for Diversity and Inclusion” in Edgar, Mangat & Momani, supra note 7 15 at 19.
Ibid at 27.
See e.g. Joanne Murray, “The Hierarchy of Opposition in Legal Education: A Letter to Prof. Robert Leckey (the incoming Dean of the McGill Law Faculty)” (25 April 2016) [unpublished], online: <https://www.mcgill.ca/law/files/law/les-paper-joanne_murray.pdf> for anecdotal examples of this dynamic within the McGill Faculty of Law student body.
See especially Adrien Habermacher, "Understanding the Ongoing Dialogues on Indigenous Issues in Canadian Legal Education Through the Lens of Institutional Cultures (Case Studies at UQAM, UAlberta, and UMoncton) (2020) 57:1 Osgoode Hall LJ 37 at 82-83, and the article more generally for contradictory views on the importance of Indigenous law for lawyers-in-training.
James Boyd White, Justice as Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
See Bhandar, supra note 6; Okros supra note 8 at 161-163 for discussions on the issue of invisible privilege in the legal academic spaces and the CAF respectively.
James Maxeiner, “Educating Lawyers Now and Then: Two Carnegie Critiques of the Common Law and the Case Method” (2007) 35:1 Intl J Leg Info 1 at 18-19.
Ibid at 27-30.
Anna Carpenter, “The Project Model of Clinical Education: Eight Principles to Maximize Student Learning and Social Justice Impact” (2013) 20:39 Clinical L Rev 39 at 58.
Lorne Sossin, “Experience the Future of Legal Education” (2014) 51:4 Alta L Rev 849 at 861 and 866.
See generally Elizabeth A Reilly, “Deposing the ‘Tyranny of the Extroverts’: Collaborative Learning in the Traditional Classroom Format” (2000) 50:4 J Leg Educ 593.
See Canada, supra note 5.
See Penny Crofts & Honni van Rijswijk, “Stories of technology: The role of legal thinking in shaping techno-legal worlds” in Technology: New Trajectories in Law (New York: Routledge, 2021) 1 at 15.
Kolawole Sola Odeku, “Conducting Law Pedagogy Using Virtual Classroom in the Era of Covid-19 Pandemic: Opportunities and Existing Obstacles” (2021) 11:1 J Educ & Soc Research 101 at 107.
Nikos Harris, “The Risks of Technology in the Classroom: Why the Next Great Development in Legal Education Might Be Going Low-Tech” (2018) 51 UBC L Rev 773.
Ibid at 797-798.
See e.g. Roderick Macdonald & Thomas McMorrow, “Decolonizing Law School” (2014) 51:4 Alta L Rev 717.
David Sandomierski, “Transcending Langdell” in Aspiration and Reality in Legal Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, (2020) 327 at 331.