Emerging to counter the anti-democratic and anti-equality culture and its progeny, the Critical Justice Initiative aims to educate, protect, nurture, and further the critical knowledges and histories sought of late to be suppressed, including those who teach them, and those groups that historically and today were and are subordinated by law and society, particularly as judged by material outcomes. These knowledges come primarily from bottom groups in societal caste, which have in turn informed bodies of critical legal scholarship (ranging across Critical Legal Studies, legal feminism, Critical Race Theory, LatCrit, ClassCrit, and TWAIL-Third World Approaches to International Law, among others) that in recent decades have helped to map and explain why law re/produces so many persistent “gaps” in justice. Complimenting this worldview or framework explaining the role of law in producing and maintaining injustice, but also at the same time as a tool toward equality, are the recorded lessons of those advocates (including participants in Community Lawyering, Cause Lawyering, Rebellious Lawyering, and others) who helped to assemble accessible tools to counter the causes and effects of justice gaps by using law for justice ever-more sharply.
The Critical Justice Initiative draws on the critical framing, or worldview, of an acclaimed new resource (Critical Justice: Systemic Advocacy in Law and Society, edited by Francisco Valdes, Steven W. Bender, and Jennifer J. Hill (West Academic 2021)) to present the key insights and a holistic sense of critical knowledge as a source or well of practical tools for organized collective struggles over democracy, equality, and justice that use law both as sword and shield. This new book helps develop structural competence for law students and other legal actors—the capacity to understand how structures, like institutions and systems, operate by design, including all their complexities, both intended and not. Substantively and pedagogically, Critical Justice is a timely and unique resource for advocates of equal justice under law with the potential to help cohere social justice lawyering in the United States like never before—and perhaps just in time.
The Critical Justice Initiative contemplates an ongoing effort and commitment to both spawn and support advocacy projects toward the protection and furtherance of critical knowledge and the individuals and groups who contribute to those insights through their research, teaching, or lived experience. Steeped in the values and commitments of critical schools that include the antisubordination value, antiessentialism, multidimensionality, community-building, intergroup justice, transnationality, and interdisciplinarity, the Critical Justice Initiative will be the umbrella for a variety of projects and initiatives that span research, diagnosis, strategy, pedagogy, praxis, and the globe to help expose and reach the root sources of persistent social problems, develop and implement complex yet practical problem-solving approaches, and steadily reverse the weighty accumulations of systemic injustice in the United States and beyond.
Initiatives/Projects/Actions
The various projects and initiatives under the umbrella of the Critical Justice Initiative, most of which are new activities for the Seattle University School of Law, and for U.S. law schools generally, may include:
- Developing and offering an annual summer workshop held at Seattle University School of Law modeled to counterbalance the annual teaching capitalism workshop, which will help new and existing teachers, both from law and other disciplines, embed their teaching and research in the insights and values of the critical schools of legal knowledge, and help them develop curriculum around those insights in the aim of teaching law students and those of other disciplines how to think critically and ethically and honestly about law, the economy, and other systems and their promises and their outcomes.
- Developing and maintaining a resource center to inform and document law school compliance and initiatives around revised ABA Standard 303 requiring that law schools provide education on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism. Also leading a national initiative to ensure that critical knowledges, values, and skills are central to compliance with this accreditation standard rather than taking a minimalist check-the-box response. See Steven W. Bender, Revised ABA Standard 303: Curricular, Pedagogical, and Substantive Questions, 47 Seattle U. L.R. SUpra 1 (2024).
- Developing curriculum at the Seattle University School of Law, and at other U.S. law schools and those in the Global South, to offer courses steeped in the knowledges and values of the critical schools of legal knowledge, and to ensure structural competencies for law students. Increasingly a prerequisite for successful problem solving across multiple social and economic sectors, structural competency is essential in a profession charged with the just administration of law in an ever-more complex society.
- Developing teaching resources and skills that build on the familiar IRAC model of law teaching and add expertise and emphasis on systems and on the key role of identities, groups, interests, and power (IGIP) in the preservation of caste systems persisting across generations, despite generations of reform, both through law and in society.
- Partnering with other law schools and their clinics, and with organizations, including those that offer legal fellowships or which represent one or more of the critical schools of legal knowledge, toward the fulfillment of Initiative goals, including the potential for teaching courses through a consortium of schools, or affiliating for the purposes of combatting censorship, intimidation, or retaliation that targets critical scholars or curriculum, or affiliation to strengthen democratic decision making on campuses, in workplaces, and in communities, and academic freedom and the free expression of controversial ideas.
- Supporting the continued evolution of the Critical Justice textbook and related teaching and advocacy resources, as well as helping to extend their reach into other professional schools and to students outside of law school.
- Building library resources around the Initiative goals, values, and advocacy projects, including online and physical resources that foster and enable nontraditional, critical legal research; both housed at Seattle University School of Law but intended as a model to be shared with other librarians.
- Sponsoring and organizing academic conferences/symposia that align with Initiative goal, values, and initiatives.
- Affiliating with other organizations with similar aims and initiatives, especially the Critical (Legal) Collective that held its first retreat at the Seattle University School of Law in July 2024, and for which the Critical Justice Initiative hopes to serve as a hub for mutual advancement of values and goals.
