Calling for Change: Women, Law, and the Legal Profession

11. Legal Education as a Strategy for Change in the Legal Profession

179 CHAPTER 11 LEGAL EDUCATION AS A STRATEGY FOR CHANGE IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION Mary Jane Mossman* INTRODUCTION But where, if not in school and workplace, is society built and changed?1 In The Real World of Technology, the renowned Canadian physicist Ursula Franklin described the idea of technology as practice, a way of organizing work and people. In her view, technology is not “the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters,” but rather a system: “technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.”2 For Franklin, many recent developments in technology represent profound and violent transformations in human society. Significantly, she suggested that nothing short of a global reformation of major social forces can provide security for the world and its citizens, a reformation that seems, according to her analysis, to need the expertise and imagination of the legal profession: Such a development will require the redefinition of rights and responsibilities, and the se
ing of limits to power and control. There have to be completely different criteria for what is permissible and what is not. Central to any new order that can shape and direct technology and human destiny will be a renewed emphasis on the concept of justice. The viability of technology, like democracy, depends in the end on the practice of justice and on the enforcement of limits to power.3 The author expresses grateful appreciation to the editor and publishers of the International Journal of the Legal Profession for permission to publish this revised version of a paper which originally appeared in volume 10:2 of the IJLP (2003). 180 Educating for Change Franklin’s emphasis on the practice of justice offers an important challenge. To what extent can legal education resist the demands of the market that have so captured the ethos of legal practice, if not all of those who are legal practitioners? To what extent do legal educators have tools and strategies, as well as ideas, to challenge dominant ideologies of corporate (legal) agendas? Do law teachers have a responsibility to join (or lead?) voices that resist defining the world in terms of market pressures and the demands of globalization? Franklin’s ideas provide the context for some reflections in this paper about gender equality in the legal profession. The paper is part of a larger project that seeks to map the intersection between the entry of women to the legal profession and related developments in social equality movements and in the “formation” of professional culture in law. It is also a work-inprogress about the relationships between legal education and the culture of the legal profession. The paper begins with a brief overview of recent literature about women in law, and then focuses on the recommendations of the task force established by the Canadian Bar Association [CBA] to promote greater gender equality in the law and legal profession in Canada in 1993.4 One recommendation suggested that law firms engage in seminars about issues of gender equality, and, as a result, I was requested to design and implement a series of seminars for three of the largest law firms in Toronto over a period of four years in the late 1990s. In earlier writing,5 I have focused on the special pedagogical challenges involved in such educational programming, and the need for problem-solving approaches quite different from most kinds of continuing education for lawyers. In this paper, I examine some perspectives on lawyering that seem important to an assessment of the role of education in fostering greater equality in the legal profession. In this context, Ursula Franklin’s insights about the impact of technology offer ways of thinking about these challenges in terms of goals of building and changing society. As her perceptive question asks, “Where, if not in school and workplace, is society built and changed?” STUDIES ON WOMEN IN LAW: PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES Women have been becoming lawyers in Canada for more than a century.6 Yet, until relatively recently, women have represented only a tiny minority of lawyers and an even smaller number within the judiciary.7 Statistics Legal Education as a Strategy for Change 181 assembled by the CBA task force indicated that the percentage of women members of the legal profession increased dramatically in all parts of Canada aer 1970. By...