Terrific symposium in latest issue of the Journal of Legal Education

Though I always enjoy reading the Journal of Legal Education, I was especially excited to see that JLE‘s November 2012 issue starts with a symposium titled “Teaching Mass Incarceration.” Here is a summary from the JLE’s introduction of the pieces in the symposium (with links inserted):

The issue begins with a Symposium on “Teaching Mass Incarceration,” a subject that has received considerable attention from activists and some from mainstream media but is remarkably absent from the law school curriculum. Giovanna Shay opens with a case study of “Inside-Out as Law School Pedagogy,” a teaching vehicle for bringing prison inmates and law students into one course, building student engagement and inspiring open-minded discussion that forces students to move beyond knee-jerk politics and clichés [available here].  The second article in the Symposium, by Sharon Dolovich, makes a powerful case for teaching the “law governing prisons,” the “back-end” of the criminal justice system and the law applicable to 2.3 million Americans, of whom a huge disproportion are African-Americans — arguably a front line in civil rights advocacy today [available here]. The third article, by Teresa A. Miller, entitled “Encountering Attica,” explores documentary film-making to transform the dialogue of the “inside-out class” into a vehicle for reaching much larger audiences [available here].  Readers of these contributions will be hard-pressed to deny the case for more visibility and engagement with mass incarceration and the means to accomplish those goals.

I thoroughly enjoyed and learned much from all three of these articles, and I encourage even those not in the ivory tower to check them out.