Faculty Learning Circles

The third principle of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Principles and Standards for Legal Research Competencies states: “A successful researcher critically evaluates information.” This evaluation includes evaluating legal information of material under criteria of “authority, credibility, currency, authenticity, relevance, and bias.” Does this standard include information contained in legal casebooks? This article’s goal is to show examples of case treatment in casebooks in Constitutional Law, Property, and Civil Procedure that demonstrate authors’ biases in their selection and editing of cases. Under the AALL standards and the ACRL Standards and Framework for Information literacy, librarians should teach students how to think critically about all the legal information presented to them—including casebooks.

-6:41: Prof. Rebecca Tushnet discusses creating and using a free and open source Property casebook which allows you to integrate diversity into the classroom through the choices in the text itself but also is a fundamental equitable process allowing students to access materials.
-25:42: Prof. Nadiyah Humber discusses her use of pictures of the authors to give a clearer picture and how their appearances may impact how they walked the world and how their identities might influence their work (used in books, quotes, other recommended reading).
-33:37: Prof. Bridget Crawford and Prof. Kathy Stanchi discuss Feminist Judgments, a series of books in which major court decisions are rewritten from a feminist perspective using the precedent of the time.

Feminist Judgment Series: Rewritten Judicial Opinions rewrites key judicial decisions through a social justice lens. Using a broad approach to feminist methods and theories that highlights traditionally marginalized perspectives such as gender, race and class, these rewritten opinions provide an alternative history of United States law. These feminist judgments directly challenge the idea that the law is neutral and objective by suggesting how cases could have been decided differently if guided by concerns about justice for all people, even with the same facts and precedent as the original judgment. Because the rewritten judgments straddle theory and practice, they provide clear, practical illustrations of how theory can be used to change the law.

All events from 2021-2022 academic year.