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58 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 413 (2021)
Criminal Legal Education

handle is hein.journals/amcrimlr58 and id is 422 raw text is: ESSAY CRIMINAL LEGAL EDUCATION Shaun Ossei-Owusu* ABSTRACT The protests of 2020 have jumpstarted conversations about criminal justice reform in the public and professoriate. Although there have been longstanding demands for reformation and reimagining of the criminal justice system, recent calls have taken on a new urgency. Greater public awareness of racial bias, increasing visual evidence of state-sanctioned killings, and the televised policing of peaceful dissent have forced the public to reckon with a penal state whose bru- tality was comfortably tolerated. Scholars are publishing op-eds, policy pro- posals, and articles with rapidity, pointing to different factors and actors that produce the need for reform. However, one input has gone relatively unconsid- ered: legal education. INTRODUCTION ............... ............................................ 414 I. CRIMINAL LEGAL EDUCATION AND THE REPRODUCTION OF HIERARCHY . . . 416 II. LAW SCHOOL SOCIALIZATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 CONCLUSION.. ............... .............................................. 427 Faculty who teach criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence-what I describe as criminal legal education-are unassuming but integral players in the American system of punishment. They are responsible for the early legal training of prosecutors and public defenders. Surprisingly, the relationship between these lawyers' education and criminal justice outcomes is underexplored. This Essay provokes a different kind of conversation by arguing that criminal legal education has some responsibility for our penal status quo. To fortify this argument, this Essay draws on scholarship on legal education and the legal profession. This * Presidential Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School. This Essay benefitted from feedback and conversations with Atinuke Adediran, Amna Akbar, Chaz Arnette, Khiara Bridges, Bennett Capers, Guy-Uriel Charles, Angela Davis, Roger Fairfax, Trevor Gardner, Osamudia James, Ben Levin, K-Sue Park, Jonathan Simon, Henry Bluestone Smith, and Adnan Zulfiqar. Special thanks to Megan Russo for excellent research assistance. While working on this Essay, I came into the community with a group of professors working to get scholars of punishment to confront our collective role in our penal moment. I benefited from that intellectual community, and it includes Amna Akbar, Chaz Arnett, Monica Bell, Nicole Smith Futrell, Sean Hill, Jamelia Morgan, Allegra McLeod, Naomi Murakawa, Ngozi Ogidegbe, K-Sue Park, Jocelyn Simonson, Priscilla Ocen, and India Thusi. All errors are mine. ( 2021, Shaun Ossei-Owusu. 413

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