Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Oldfield, Kenneth

English

Structural Nepotism: On the Reluctance of Law Schools to Include Social Class Origins among their Faculty Diversity Goals

Colatrella, Michael T., Jr.

What I Learned about Teaching Law by Being an Art Student

Chien, Shih-Chun Steven

Mehrotra, Ajay K.

Wang, Xiangnong

Sociolegal Research, the Law School Survey of Student Engagement,and Studying Diversity in Judicial Clerkships

Paul, Jeremy

Woo, Margaret Y.K.

Rosser, Ezra

Dinerstein, Robert

237
From the Editors
For many law professors, the experiences they had as law students often 
serve as the primary lens through which they make sense of their own students’ 
experiences. Who could doubt the value in connecting with students over the 
stress of the first legal research and writing memo or over the challenge in-
volved in learning the rule against perpetuities? But the legal academy will 
surely prosper from learning directly from students themselves. That is where 
the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) project comes in. 
We are proud to give voice to lessons learned from the most comprehensive 
data available to date on what contemporary students say about law school. 
And we are especially grateful to LSSSE Director and guest editor, Meera 
Deo, for her tireless efforts in putting together this symposium issue devoted 
to the LSSSE project. With contributions from those involved in the LSSSE 
project since it was founded in 2004 as well as from researchers making use of 
LSSSE data, this issue features a collection of articles and essays exploring the 
history of LSSSE and demonstrating the richness of the data collected through 
the LSSSE annual survey. Listening to law students can help law professors 
realize that their experiences are not necessarily the only way in which people 
experience law school. Listening to students also provides insights that can 
help law school “work” for all students, including those traditionally under-
served and those who might otherwise struggle with the law school experience. 
This issue also features a number of stand-alone articles covering a broad 
range of topics. Kenneth Oldfield, in his article, “Structural Nepotism: On 
the Reluctance of Law Schools to Include Social Class Origins among their 
Faculty Diversity Goals,” explores the often-neglected issue of social class in 
faculty diversity. In their article, “Building Bridges: How Law Schools Can 
Better Prepare Students from Historically-Underserved Communities to Excel 
in Law School,” Amy Soled and Barbara Hoffman suggest concrete changes 
that law schools can make to ensure student success for all. In a wonderfully re-
flective article, “What I learned about Law By Being an Art Student,” Michael 
Colatrella contemplates lessons formal art instruction has for law professors. In 
“Method Lawyering: Immersion Teaching Illustrated,” Kris Franklin describes 
how simulated client work can make students active participants in their own 
education. Finally, we round out this issue with Joe Buffington tackling the lin-
guistic complications of multiple-choice questions in his article, “Conditional 
Answers to Multiple-Choice Questions: Three Linguistic Problems (and Solu-
tions) for “if”.” Though readers might not have picked up this issue with the 
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 69, Number 2 (Winter 2020)
238 Journal of Legal Education
goal, for example, of learning about how formal art education can inform law 
teaching, these articles are full of worthy insights and make important contri-
butions to law school pedagogical practices and to understanding the faculty 
who deploy them. We hope you find time to explore them. 
Robert Dinerstein
Ezra Rosser


From the Editors

Chaco, Ernestine

Mentorship, Leadership and Being an Indigenous Woman

Neumeier, Shain M.

Providing Effective and Supportive Legal Career Guidance for Neurodivergent Law Students and Attorneys

Burchfield, Jessie Wallace

Book Review of Law in the Time of COVID-19

Cortland, Matthew

10
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 71, Number 1 (Fall 2021)
“I’m Not Supposed to Be a Lawyer”
Matthew Cortland
I’m not supposed to be a lawyer. I grew up in a burned-out post-industrial 
city in Massachusetts, the son of a mechanic and a medical assistant. I didn’t 
know any lawyers, save the one who met me once at a family function and 
convinced my parents that I might be “smart enough” to test my way into an 
elite New England prep school. Once in prep school, I could imagine attending 
college and being some kind of professional. I made it to college and chose to 
become a developmental psychologist. I majored in human development (at 
my undergraduate institution this was, basically, psychology for students who 
are interested in people instead of rats), and I imagined a career helping kids 
recover from childhood abuse. I planned to split my professional time: half in 
clinical settings and the other on research. 
Then my health insurance company tried to kill me, and I began to 
understand that I would have to change plans.
This sounds hyperbolic. It’s not. For some years, I had been using a drug 
called Remicade to treat my Crohn’s disease, and then it stopped working. 
I got really sick. My gastroenterologist—a leading physician at one of the 
nation’s top medical institutions—prescribed a different drug, Humira, which 
the FDA had approved to treat ulcerative colitis but had not yet approved to 
treat Crohn’s. My health insurance company denied the prior authorization 
request, and then we filed a seventy-two-hour emergency appeal. 
Seventy-two hours turned into weeks, then months, of stonewalling. The 
insurance company repeatedly denied having received the paperwork. After I 
produced definitive evidence that it had, the company claimed that my doctor 
did not have the authority to file an appeal on my behalf. After I showed 
the insurance representatives language from their own plan documents that 
contradicted this claim, they continued to stall. In the meantime, I was rapidly 
losing weight. I could not eat food without vomiting. I had persistent diarrhea. 
I was in constant pain, with nothing to manage it. The pain was so extreme 
that nonexistence seemed preferable to continued suffering. 
Ultimately, it was a lawyer who saved my life—the same one who had helped 
me get into prep school as a kid. I went to see him, at this point carrying a 
mere 130 pounds on my six-foot frame, and he decided to write the insurance 
company a demand letter. In retrospect, any legal claim I had was weak—
Matthew Cortland is currently a Senior Fellow at Data For Progress working on disability. 
Matthew wishes to thank Lilith Siegel for her contributions to this issue and especially thank 
Karen Tani, without whom this piece would not exist.
11“I’m Not Supposed to Be a Lawyer”
this was an aggressive health plan completely immune to state regulation—
but the letter worked. By the close of business the next day I had the prior 
authorization in hand. That was when I realized I might have to become a 
lawyer, if only to keep myself alive. 
After that episode, I tried briefly to pursue my dream career in developmental 
psychology, even enrolling in Teachers College at Columbia University. It 
didn’t take long, though, for another health flare to occur, sending me back 
to my doctors in Massachusetts and to the whims of my health insurance 
corporation. I decided that if I wanted to be an effective self-advocate, I 
needed graduate-level training in both public health and law. For reasons 
of convenience (mainly, access to health care and a generous scholarship), I 
started with public health. 
My public health training was both discouraging and affirming. It was 
discouraging in that my professors demonstrated so little awareness of the 
realities of chronic illness. (Case in point: a professor who refused to allow 
me to reschedule a final exam when I had been admitted to the hospital with 
a life-threatening small-bowel obstruction.) It was useful in that I came into 
contact with a lot of health law scholars, and it was clear that I needed their 
legal-technical knowledge. To put it bluntly, I needed to know how to sue a 
health insurer.
Unfortunately, the kind of people who really need to know how to sue an 
insurance company face barriers accessing law school. For applicants with 
chronic illness, one challenge is that grade point average is a key metric, and the 
Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) has no mechanism for discounting 
aberrational semesters. In my case, there was one entire semester in which I 
was too sick to go to school but couldn’t drop out without losing my health 
insurance (thus facing the very real possibility of death) and so received all 
“Fs.” Thankfully, my overall GPA and test scores were still good enough to 
get me some admissions offers. Following the conventional wisdom at the time 
(that you go to the highest-ranked school that you get into), I set off for the 
law school at George Mason University (GMUSL), now the Antonin Scalia 
Law School.
As that renaming suggests, GMUSL was, and is, extremely conservative. 
Courses on originalism and law and economics were part of the required 
curriculum (the former taught by a professor with a National Rifle Association-
endowed chair). Koch brothers’ money is unapologetically embraced. When I 
was there, the student population had been identified as the most conservative 
in the nation. I went in well aware of all of this. I thought it would be a 
worthwhile endeavor to spend some time arguing with people whose legal 
and policy preferences could literally kill me. 
12 Journal of Legal Education
What I was unprepared for was the outright hostility toward disability, 
even as the law school happily told me I was counted in their tally of 
“underrepresented minorities.” 
That hostility emerged as soon as I raised the issue of accommodations. 
(Basically, I wanted not to be disadvantaged or penalized when I had to get up 
from class or from an exam to use the restroom.) After producing voluminous 
medical documentation in support of my request for accommodations 
(documentation to which I had access only because I had health insurance 
and a medical team willing to fill out lengthy forms without reimbursement 
for the effort), and waiting several weeks for a required meeting with disability 
services on the main GMU campus, I was given many of the accommodations 
I requested. However, law school officials told me that I could not notify my 
professors that I was entitled to accommodations. If I did, they said, I would 
face discipline, even expulsion. Charitably, these officials saw disclosure as 
a threat to anonymous grading. But their objection demonstrated that they 
had no understanding of the actual contents of my accommodations and had 
never thought through whether providing a student additional time on an 
exam precludes anonymous grading (it does not). I had to request that the 
main campus intervene before the law school would change course—a terrible 
way to begin law school. 
Things got worse when it came time for law school officials to administer 
my exam-related accommodations. I recall two occasions during my 1L year 
when law school administrators miscalculated the time I was allowed on my 
final exams and notified me of the error partway through the exam. 
Professors were no better than administrators when it came to disability 
accommodations. When I approached one of my 1L professors about my 
accommodations, he said he hoped I didn’t need anything “silly,” such as a large 
font. And many professors essentially cross-examined me, asking variations on 
a question familiar to many disabled students: “But how will I know you aren’t 
faking?” As if a severe and, at times, life-threatening course of an inflammatory 
bowel disease might actually just be a way of blowing off class. 
After two years of this, it was clear to me that I could handle law school, 
but also that this law school had taken a toll. Other students complained to 
the administration about the disability accommodations I had been granted. 
I was unaware of anyone else at the law school who was chronically ill or 
disabled. I can think of only two professors who were encouraging (a legal 
writing instructor and an adjunct who taught trial advocacy). Many others 
conveyed to me that I had no future in the law—that in light of my illness it 
would be irresponsible of me to try to practice law; that a character and fitness 
committee might see it the same way (therefore denying me a license); that 
even if I did get a license and somehow “bamboozled” a firm into hiring me, 
I would be out of a job within six months, after I inevitably “blew off” work 
(i.e., got sick); that no court was going to give me the kind of accommodations 
I enjoyed in school and that I would fail. 
13“I’m Not Supposed to Be a Lawyer”
I ended up doing my third year at Suffolk Law School, where I encountered 
decent people who valued my contributions. But the messages from George 
Mason stayed with me as I prepared for the bar exam. I knew that disability 
discrimination was real and that I needed to be strategic. Because several 
attorneys had told me that states in the West tended to be friendlier to bar 
takers requesting disability-based accommodations, I paired the bar exam in 
Massachusetts (where I intended to practice) with the one in Oregon (which 
did not conflict with Massachusetts). 
I passed both exams—but the fact that I felt compelled to take two exams, 
with a red-eye flight in between, is a damning commentary on the accessibility 
of the bar. So is my experience applying for accommodations. I spent many 
hours not only requesting and assembling the correct medical documentation, 
but also weeding through my records to make sure I appeared “disabled 
enough” to qualify for accommodations, but not so disabled as to raise red 
flags with a character and fitness committee. Somehow I threaded that needle. 
I wasn’t supposed to be a lawyer—by my own lights and according to most of 
the legal professionals and educators I have encountered. But I became one 
anyway, because I had to. 
This is why I don’t automatically steer people away from law school when 
they ask me about it—despite everything I’ve recounted here. Often the 
people who approach me are being oppressed by unjust systems; they are in 
marginalized positions, particularly with regard to healthcare. And although I 
often say that being a professional patient taught me more than law school in 
terms of the skills I now use to keep people alive, the truth is that a law degree 
often makes an essential difference in these life-or-death battles. When I write 
letters to benefit agencies and insurance companies and employers, it matters 
that I have “esquire” after my name.
Thirty years after the enactment of the ADA, legal education and the 
legal profession still send the message that disabled people are not supposed 
to be lawyers. Ableism is built into the foundation of the profession. It’s 
reinforced every time a student’s request for reasonable accommodations 
is met with hostility, a disabled bar applicant is left behind by dangerous 
testing conditions during the pandemic, and a disabled first-year associate is 
pretextually terminated. But as more and more people insist that they need to 
be lawyers, and as those students build community and power inside of law 
schools, perhaps the architecture of ableism will finally crumble.


“I’m Not Supposed to Be a Lawyer”

Paul, Jeremy R.

Rolland, Sonia E.

203
From the Editors 
At the dawn of 2020, as reports surfaced concerning the spread of COVID-19 
and universities announced the shift to online instruction, it was clear to us at 
the Journal of Legal Education that the forced national experiment with remote 
learning deserved immediate study and commentary. We found inspired partners 
at the University of Miami School of Law in Dean Tony Varona, and Vice Dean 
for Intellectual Life, Lili Levi, and we co-sponsored with them a virtual symposium 
on August 5, 2020, entitled Power, Privilege and Transformation: Lessons from 
the Pandemic for Online Legal Education. You can read about it here: https://
www.law.miami.edu/events/symposia/2020/power-privilege-transformation/.
But while our marvelous speakers anticipated so many of the important 
issues that the pandemic posed for legal education, we were much less savvy 
about gauging the effects of COVID-19 on our ability to publish the journal 
in a timely fashion. Staff illnesses, changing personnel configurations and the 
challenges our editors faced in converting our own classes to online instruction 
overwhelmed our plan to publish a selected group of essays from that symposium 
in a timely fashion.
Fortunately for our readers, however, many of our authors agreed to stick 
with us even as 2022 draws to a close. We are proud indeed of their work and 
stress that any loss of value in these articles due to timeliness is entirely the fault 
of the Journal. We have no doubt, however, that the articles we have included 
in this rare double issue remain deeply relevant as legal educators reflect on 
what we have just experienced and begin to plan for a legal academy in which 
the changes wrought by COVID-19 become part of our permanent landscape.
Cass Sunstein and Danielle Conway open the issue with keynote addresses 
from our August 2020 virtual symposium (Sunstein) and the 2021 AALS Joint 
Section Program of the Sections on Student Services and Part-Time Division, 
Academic Support, Balance in Legal Education, Minority Groups, and Pre-
Legal Education and Admission to Law School (Conway). Professor Sunstein 
highlights powerful social dynamics that occur in group settings such as law 
school classrooms and wonders how phenomena such as self-silencing, group 
polarization, cascade effects, and hidden profiles, all of which he eloquently 
explains, might play out differently in online settings from the way they do when 
students gather in person. Dean Conway powerfully documents the countless 
ways that law schools have fulfilled their mission only through tireless contribu-
tions from student services professionals. She applauds and thanks them for 
their work, and so do we.
Nina Kohn’s article has been a mainstay, via its presence on SSRN, for faculty 
seeking guidance on the tips of the trade for translating their teaching efforts 
into differing online formats. Yvonne Dutton and Margaret Ryznar add their 
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 70, Numbers 2 & 3 (Winter & Spring 2021)
204 Journal of Legal Education
own reflections on the pros and cons of online instruction and feedback with 
particular emphasis on persuading readers to remain open to some advantages 
of the online world. Audrey Fried astutely trains her eye on the widely shared 
search for ways to reproduce, in an online format, the sort of wide-ranging 
stimulating conversations that occur in the classroom and offers us a “commu-
nity of inquiry” framework as a useful approach. Bill Blatt echoes some of the 
themes Professor Fried raises when he emphasizes the value of “presence” to 
the educational mission. Andrele Brutus St. Val keeps our focus on the student 
experience, adding insightful suggestions about promoting on-line engagement 
drawn from empirical evidence gathered in other fields and from her own survey 
research. As disruptive as it was for classroom teachers to convert to an on-line 
format, the challenges confronting clinical supervisors were arguably even more 
complex. Sarah Fishel, Kellie Wiltsie, and David DeMatteo offer productive 
ideas for tackling these challenges with implications for clinical supervision 
that extend to the traditional in-person variety.
Turning next to the larger questions the pandemic raises for the future of 
legal education, Michael Froomkin provides a capacious account of economic 
pressures upon law schools and how technology may force dramatic change 
much more quickly than we might imagine. Christian Sundquist broadens the 
lens still further, exploring the disruptive effects of technology upon phenomena 
outside the academy, including the practice of law and even the very defini-
tion of law itself. Richard K. Neumann, Jr. then brings us to broad questions 
of university governance to explore how universities succeeded and failed to 
include faculties in crucial decisions about how best to respond to COVID-19. 
Finally, Michael Mogill reminds us all that none of our efforts to improve legal 
education can succeed without remembering the crucial role that community 
and compassion play in building better law schools.
Our At the Lectern feature by Daniel Keating is a heartfelt story of how he 
experienced the transition to on-line teaching necessitated by COVID-19. And 
we have three insightful book reviews; Jessie Wallace Burchfield reviews Law 
in the Time of COVID-19 by Katharina Pistor; Elizabeth Bloom assesses Improving 
Student Learning in the Doctrinal Law School Classroom: Skills & Assessment, by Kimberly 
E. O’Leary, Jeanette Buttrey, and Joni Larson; and Scott Cummings turns his 
trained eye on Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And The Next) by 
Dean Spade.
We hope you will agree with our conclusion that this double volume is better 
late than never. Your feedback is welcome. Enjoy.
Jeremy Paul
Sonia Rolland
Robert Dinerstein
Ezra Rosser


St. Val, Andrele Brutus

Survey Says—How to Engage Law Students in the Online Learning Environment

Not a member yet

Structural Nepotism: On the Reluctance of Law Schools to Include Social Class Origins among their Faculty Diversity Goals

What I Learned about Teaching Law by Being an Art Student

Sociolegal Research, the Law School Survey of Student Engagement,and Studying Diversity in Judicial Clerkships

From the Editors

Mentorship, Leadership and Being an Indigenous Woman

Providing Effective and Supportive Legal Career Guidance for Neurodivergent Law Students and Attorneys

Book Review of Law in the Time of COVID-19

“I’m Not Supposed to Be a Lawyer”

From the Editors

Survey Says—How to Engage Law Students in the Online Learning Environment

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