Leadership and Social Justice Lawyering
Integrating leadership into the legal curriculum presents an opportunity for law schools to better prepare students for the practice of law and their roles as civic leaders.1 Law and leadership studies are designed to build technical, behavioral, and professional proficiencies in law graduates as an important, practical supplement to substantive legal knowledge. Recently, the American Bar Association reiterated its call for law schools to “focus on making future *972 lawyers practice ready” in order to meet the demands of complex contemporary practice; and encouraged legal educators to “provide the knowledge, skills, values, habits and traits that make up the successful modern lawyer.”2 As practitioners and academics endeavor to make curriculum more relevant and practically useful for law graduates, law-oriented leadership studies present avenues to teach both substantive legal analysis and critical lawyering skills, such as problem solving, strategic planning, and negotiation.3