Law schools, other professional schools, and institutions of higher education all around the country have been reevaluating their structure, mission, curricula, pedagogy, hiring and admissions practices, climate, and other elements of academic life with the goal of ascertaining how best to promote a more just, fair, inclusive, and diverse environment for learning.  Students, staff, administrators, and faculty have created listservs and other informal platforms to share ideas and resources, but to date there has been no single research-based platform that gathers cutting edge and canonical work on the wide range of potentially relevant topics to guide and provide structure to the design of reforms or support advocacy on DE&I issues.  Stanford Law School and the Robert Crown Library have launched a beta version of the first national clearinghouse to index research of this kind.  This policy lab provides interested students an opportunity to expand the index, help develop and implement standards for curation, incorporate feedback from users, engage in policy discussions about iterative design, and develop frameworks for assessment of the project.

The primary work plan involves deepening the available research on a number of topics including: 1L and advanced doctrinal pedagogy, critical race theory, other critical approaches to law, cultural competence and cultural humility in training for law and other service professions, professional judgment, assessments of DE&I training in the private and public sector, published templates for university DE&I reforms, principles of academic freedom, global innovations in DE&I theory, as well as interdisciplinary research on anti-racism, implicit bias and other forms of cognitive bias, viewpoint discrimination, micro-aggression, trauma, and stereotype threat.

Students will work with Prof. Norman W. Spaulding and reference librarians at the law school. There may also be opportunity to work with students, staff, administrators, and faculty at other law schools and other university departments.

Course Catalog