Prof. Armour leads discussion on “Stereotypes in the First-Year Curriculum”
As students, alumni and guests settled in at USC Law for a daylong discussion of the importance of diversity, USC Law professor Jody Armour challenged the audience with this rhetorical question:
“Obama’s in office, right? What’s left to do in terms of diversity? It’s clear that anybody can be President.”
Armour went on to discuss the continued importance of diversity in “post-racial America,” specifically as it pertains to the law school classroom. His talk, “Stereotypes in the First-Year Curriculum,” was one of several sessions at the Diversity in the Legal Profession Symposium, hosted March 11 by the Southern California Review of Law & Social Justice and the Diversity Affairs Committee.
Armour, an expert in criminal defense and prosecution, racial profiling, personal injury claims and sexual predator cases, explained that diversity will still be relevant as long as our society holds certain, often unconscious, stereotypes.
To see these stereotypes, Armour pointed to an experiment in which subjects evaluated an ambiguous bump by one confederate against another. Some interpreted the bumps as gentle or playful pushes, while others thought they were hostile shoves.
When everything except the race of the person initiating the bump was controlled, the results were startling. About 70 percent of the subjects found the bump to be hostile when a black person initiated it, while 70 percent of the subjects found it to be innocuous when a white person initiated it.
When the study was replicated among children, similar results were obtained.
Additionally, Armour said, subjects who thought both black and white confederates had committed a violent act tended to attribute “wrongs” to a person’s character when the confederate was black and to the situation when he or she was white.
Armour then linked the study to law and legal education.
“That should sound familiar,” Armour said. “That’s mens rea. Do you attribute the wrongdoing to the character of the wrongdoer or do you attribute the wrongdoing to the situation?”
But Armour said law students are simply taught that mens rea means “aware mental state,” and whether it is present is a cut-and-dry factual judgment, independent of situation, character or attribution.
Because students are thinking more and more about simply applying fact patterns to making decisions, Armour said they may be losing sight of the larger, real issues of racism and social justice.
“Students aren’t talking about racial and social justice issues anymore,” Armour said.
Armour wondered aloud how law school discussions of certain cases would change if there were no black students or no women present, for example.
He concluded by mentioning that the goal of the first-year curriculum is to get students to think like lawyers. He then asked the audience: “Do you worry that thinking like a lawyer means we respond to the world in a different way than we did when we came through the door?”
Following Armour’s talk, Dean Robert K. Rasmussen spoke at a luncheon about USC Law’s commitment to diversity.
USC Law Professor Camille Rich then moderated a panel on “The State of Diversity in the Legal Profession,” featuring panelists the Honorable Jennifer T. Lum, magistrate judge; Matthew DeGrushe, dean of career services at USC Law; Warren Loui, parter at Mayer Brown; Lauren Eber, associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; ACLU Racial Justice Director Catherine Lhamon; and Joseph Ybarra, partner at Munger Tolles.
Deans Chloe Reid and Rob Saltzman concluded the day with a discussion of diversity in the law school admissions process.
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