Abstract

Excerpted From: Doron Samuel-Siegel, Dismantling the Whiteness of Legal Education, 25 Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal 280 (2025-2026) (232 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Whiteness pervades legal education. It shapes everything from curricular design and norms about the rule of law, to bar exam preparation and approaches to professional competency. For example, whiteness sustains the false belief that race and racism are tangential to most coursework rather than foundational to understanding how law operates in society. It also underlies the failure to prepare law graduates to think systematically about dismantling structural racism. And its influence extends beyond the classroom itself, contributing to insufficient institutional attention to racialized disparities in bar passage rates and to the broader inequities those disparities reproduce within the legal profession.

Whiteness operates as an allegiance to structural racism. As a result of its influence, whether intentionally or not, legal education reproduces structural racism and produces lawyers ill-equipped to contribute effectively to the project of racial justice. Because of structural racism, people who are racialized as white reap unearned benefits, while people who are racially minoritized can experience systematic harms. The consequences of structural racism’s reproduction are visible not only in legal education, but also in the legal reasoning and institutional decision-making that shape democratic life. As renowned civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill has observed with respect to Supreme Court Justices, there is currently a failure to cultivate the kinds of racial literacy, historical understanding, and democratic accountability necessary for principled legal decision-making in a multiracial society. Her observations pertain equally to all lawyers and judges more broadly. Only with such competencies can legal reasoning become sufficiently “robust, complex, mature, and accountable” to counteract entrenched legal structures that have failed to realize the promise of equal protection.

The shortcomings in the judicial reasoning that Ifill critiques are, at least in part, likely byproducts of the Justices’ legal education, which was shaped by whiteness but devoid of explicit training about how whiteness functions and how it might be dismantled. Although today’s lawyers and judges did not create the world that produced these deficiencies, they are now helping to shape the world that follows. Without interruption and dismantlement, legal education will continue reproducing the inequities of structural racism rather than equipping lawyers to challenge them.

Recognizing these dynamics requires closer examination of the role legal education itself plays in reproducing structural racial inequality. Scholarship has long documented the benefits and harms produced by structural racism across societal domains, from wealth, to health, and beyond, and has examined the role of legal education in this dynamic. Further, this scholarship has only recently begun to focus specifically on the role of whiteness, describing the absence of education about whiteness in law school curricula, and documenting how law schools function as “white spaces” where the people, architecture, curricular substance, and teaching practices preserve white advantage.

Yet, there remains a need for scholarship that examines how whiteness operates within legal education itself and delves deeply into how legal educators might dismantle its influence within law school pedagogy and culture. That need is especially pressing because law schools are duty bound to participate in the eradication of racial injustice. Law schools undertake an obligation to educate lawyers capable of “effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession”12-a profession with a “special responsibility for the quality of justice.”

To help legal educators carry out this duty, this Article advances the literature by conducting a novel analysis of how whiteness operates within legal education. It also offers a comprehensive methodology with actionable strategies for dismantling its pervasiveness. The Article argues that understanding whiteness requires more than identifying racialized harms experienced by people who are not white; it also requires examining the ways legal education normalizes, protects, and makes invisible the advantages that accrue to whiteness itself. In centering whiteness, the Article also deliberately shifts focus away from individual blame and toward the ideas, norms, and institutional practices that sustain structural racism. Whiteness, as conceptualized here, is not about condemning particular people or identities, but about examining the ways individuals are socialized within systems that normalize and reproduce racial hierarchy. Because whiteness operates through ideas and practices rather than immutable personal characteristics, legal educators and law students alike possess agency to reject, interrupt, and dismantle it. Studying whiteness therefore opens space not only for critique, but also for meaningful institutional and individual reform.

The methodology of dismantlement offered here is founded in a pedagogy of antiracism. Consisting of five dimensions which focus on educator self-assessment, student needs and experiences, curricular substance, teaching methods, and accountability, the holistic framework guides law teachers by calling attention to these five inflection points on the pathway to dismantlement. Rather than a linear, step-by-step process, the methodology is a panoply of considerations that can empower law teachers to contribute to dismantling whiteness in legal education within their own spheres of influence. Indeed, the Article’s central prescriptive contribution is a practical and actionable methodology that legal educators can employ to identify, interrupt, and dismantle whiteness within legal pedagogy and professional formation.

For instance, the methodology highlights work that law teachers can do to build knowledge of whiteness itself as well as understand the psychological dynamics that accompany the study of whiteness. The methodology also calls on educators to teach about whiteness across the curriculum and infuse systemic change agency into the culture of legal learning. And it offers strategies to help combat white fragility, reduce racialized disparities in the legal profession, and bolster accountability.

To accomplish its objectives, the Article begins in Part I with a definitional exploration of whiteness and other concepts relevant to dismantlement. Explaining that whiteness operates as an allegiance to structural racism, it illustrates the ideas and ways of being that constitute whiteness, such as entitlement to power, expectations of comfort, and the mythology of racial neutrality. Next, Part II samples the ways whiteness operates in legal education. It identifies ways that whiteness shows up in the substance of the law school curriculum as well as the norms legal educators teach to their students, and demonstrates how whiteness even inhibits the effectiveness of curriculum that addresses race and racism directly. The Article concludes with Part III, where the five-dimensional methodology is described, and where law teachers are offered concrete strategies for employing the methodology to bring about the dismantlement to which this Article aspires.

This project calls on legal educators to acknowledge the whiteness of law and pedagogy; to teach students to critically engage with it; and to equip them to recognize, interrupt, and dismantle the ways whiteness operates. In doing so, legal education can equip law graduates not merely to navigate institutions shaped by whiteness, but to challenge and transform them, thereby aligning legal education more fully with the broader project of racial justice. Accomplishing this work will require legal educators to engage in sustained assessment and reform. The task will not be easy. But only by undertaking it will law schools truly begin playing their part in decommissioning the quiet engine of racial hierarchy.

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For so long as the ideas and ways of being that constitute whiteness pervade legal education, the structural racism that it protects will be free to thrive largely undisturbed in the law and legal profession. But the continued injustice of structural racism is inconsistent with lawyers’ “special responsibility for the quality of justice.” As such, law teachers-the people who prepare lawyers to carry out this special responsibility-are duty-bound to interrupt these unjust cycles. Dismantling the whiteness of legal education is essential to that interruption.

Whiteness is, by its very nature, an elusive construct. It thrives on not being noticed or named. However, legal educators can play an integral role in reforming this reality. By not merely noticing and naming, but also methodically critiquing and dismantling whiteness in legal education, they have the power to bring about a legal profession and, in turn, a system of laws, that truly begin a departure from the United States’ long journey of structural racism. By decommissioning the quiet engine of racial hierarchy, law teachers will live up to their obligations to students and, in turn, contribute to the establishment of equal justice under law.

Doron Samuel-Siegel is Professor of Law, Legal Practice, at the University of Richmond School of Law.