Law schools can and should serve as engines of social and economic mobility for their students, particularly students of color, first-generation students, and students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This is especially true at broad-access institutions, which often enroll such students at higher rates than more elite schools. A new project and academic research center at New York Law School are undertaking a pioneering study and developing tools to help law schools more fully realize these goals.

This work is grounded in key research-based insights into how people learn. Law students start their studies with a diverse array of accumulated knowledge and experience. But the tendency of traditional legal education is to abstract subject matter from personal experience. This approach contravenes major literature in the learning sciences that shows significant educational benefits from pedagogical approaches that feature engagement with students’ own cultural and personal knowledge and experience into the classroom to bridge gaps between that prior context and the subject matter of the class. This approach to teaching, increasingly used in K-12 settings, is less common in higher education and is rarely used in law schools.