Monica Teixeira de Sousa (Roger Williams), The Law Professor and the Therapist: Beyond Belonging There's a Place (and Need) for Group Solidarity among First Generation and Low-Income Students in the Law School Setting, 28 Roger Williams U. L. Rev. 161 (2023):
We come full circle then to the why of this intervention. Practical, yes. Relatively inexpensive, also true. But capable of creating a class-conscious group of lawyers determined to use their education to change structural conditions of inequity? Only time will tell. Martín-Baró believed it was through social organization that “members of the oppressed classes [would gain] a consciousness of their common interests and an understanding that if their world does not change it is largely because of their division and individualistic isolation.” But judging the efficacy of a liberatory practice by the beliefs of those we memorialize for their selflessness may not be realistic.
We do know that liberatory praxis can bring our students’ lived experiences into focus. Instead of feeling constrained by a bounded reality, they begin to see the possibilities of transformation and recognize their individual agency in creating a new set of conditions. The liberatory process of conscientização awakens in students a sensibility they can apply in their future roles as lawyers, jurists, and elected officials. Once awakened to their reality, it is difficult to unsee the “oppressive processes by which…their social contexts are constructed.” As a true liberation project, the law professor and therapist intervention has the potential to awaken this striver class to its potential role in transforming the larger structures oppressing the lower-income and working classes in which they grew up. This intervention may also result in changes being made at the law school level that benefit future classes of first-generation and low-income background students. The greater the share of law schools that implement the law professor and therapist intervention, the more data we will have to definitively answer these questions in the affirmative.
Ultimately, one of the most lasting impacts of the intervention described herein may be the message sent to first-generation and low-income background students that their life experiences have equipped them to enter the rarified legal education environment with their “differences and make them strengths.”138 Arming students with this robust knowledge of self-equips them to use the law to disestablish inequitable systems and to fight “against the use of education in the reproduction of a class society.”139 In light of the responsibilities these students will soon undertake to their clients, law schools should do no less.
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