by Peter Slevin
In the essay, “Minority and Women Law Professors: A Comparison of Teaching Styles,” she spoke up for a more human understanding of law and the work of lawyers and argued that women and people of color connected with students in fresh and valuable ways. She suggested, referring to The Paper Chase, that space should be cleared for instructors who did not conform to the Professor Kingsfield model of imperious superiority. However cinematic, the image of law school cultivated in The Paper Chase and Scott Turow’s One L constrained student expectations and influenced faculty teaching styles—and not in a good way, she argued. “In the name of tradition, these images serve to mold perceptions of what one should look for in a ‘genuine’ law school experience.… Unfortunately, this sense of security and comfort that students find with traditional notions of the law school experiences engenders an inherent distrust of anything that does not resemble or conform to those notions.” Michelle predicted that old-school teaching models, if left unchallenged, would be replicated in the hiring process. Instructors who tested boundaries would find themselves on the outs with a majority of students and undervalued in hiring and promotion. “The faculty’s decisions to distrust and ignore non-traditional qualities in choosing and tenuring law professors merely reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes,” she said.
Michelle chose three instructors—two black men and one white woman—to study and interview. She concluded that all three had received a chilly reception from white male colleagues and faced hostility from some students. A number of students, “solely on the basis of race and sex … feel justified in rudely challenging their authority and doubting [their] credibility,” she wrote. But when given the chance, minority and women faculty were able “to introduce innovative methods of teaching and to invoke their perspectives on different issues. Now, unlike before, students are being made to see how issues of class, race and sex are relevant to questions of law. Not only do students find that these issues are relevant, they are finding them interesting.”
Different as they were from the traditional faculty, the professors she chose were also quite different from one another. Charles Ogletree grew up in Merced, California, his father a truck driver, his mother a housekeeper, one from Alabama, the other from Arkansas. A counselor recognized his talent, and he thrived at Stanford University “despite academic and cultural disadvantages stemming from inadequate basic educational training,” Michelle wrote. Ogletree, known to friends as Tree, had doubts about the merits of law school, but he enrolled at Harvard after concluding that legal training would make him a more effective advocate. He served as president of the National Black Law Students Association and the organization’s Harvard chapter.
On a different path, David Wilkins was the son of a black graduate of Harvard Law School. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, won honors as a Harvard undergraduate, and made the Harvard Law Review before clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. The third professor, Martha Minow, was raised in a world of some privilege as the daughter of former Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow. She earned a master’s degree in education at Harvard, graduated at the top of her Yale Law School class, clerked for Marshall, and developed specialties in human rights and the status of women and racial and religious minorities. When Michelle wrote the essay, Minow was the only one of the three with tenure. Ogletree and Wilkins would later be awarded tenure and Minow would be named law school dean.
“IN PROFESSOR OGLETREE’S criminal law class,” Michelle wrote, students “could close their eyes and imagine what it would be like to see him in action in a courtroom. Like a successful trial, this professor approaches each class with a game plan and he merely uses the Socratic Method to extract from students the information necessary to make that plan work. He manages to do this, however, without interrogating students with confusing questions designed to catch them off-guard. Inflections in his voice are always calm, soothing and patient, but yet he is able to get to the point very quickly and with the precision of an artist.” Ogletree used role-playing, assigning students to play prosecutor and defense attorney. He served as moderator, “interjecting or intervening when necessary.” Discussing an issue that would remain relevant for decades, he told Michelle that context counted. “When we talk about whether or not a stop and frisk is permissible, it makes a difference to see how a stop and frisk can be abused against certain groups and, therefore, students will not be as willing to say that such a procedure is acceptable.” Years later, Ogletree said he pushed Harvard students “to understand that they’re here for a reason, and it’s not just to work at law firms and be successful in and of itself.”
David Wilkins, in Michelle’s account, adopted a more traditional approach, in part because he felt a need to demonstrate his own authority. He told her, “You don’t think that I’m going to walk into a class of Harvard Law students being young, looking even younger, black and a first-time teacher and say, ‘Hey guys, call me Dave!’ ” Michelle said Wilkins encouraged class participation without using intimidation or motivation-by-fear. “I make it a point not to cut off or treat any comment as stupid,” he said. “Also, I run my class in a way that makes discussion important and I absolutely forbid any hissing or booing.” He told Michelle that he wanted to create an atmosphere where minorities and women felt comfortable speaking out. He also made sure that students were exposed to uncommon or unfamiliar reasoning. “Part of the reason why I’m here, as opposed to a white professor,” Wilkins said, “is to bring issues of race, class and other issues into the classroom and make them part of the debate. I want to show students how a lot of what goes on in cases is fueled by issues of race and class.”
Michelle likened being a student in Minow’s family law class to being a member of the studio audience during a taping of The Phil Donahue Show. Like Donahue, the prototype of the empathetic daytime talk show host, Minow paced the classroom, “probing deeply,” using smiles and humor as she worked to make everyone feel welcome. She told Michelle that sharp analysis remained essential, but that “safety and a sense of reinforcement is more likely to produce motivation and learning than fear.” A by-product of her openness was the stream of students who sought her advice. “Students come to me because I look like someone who listens and cares,” Minow told her. “And partly because they know that I won’t turn them away. It’s important for students to feel they have a place to go.”
In her essay, Michelle called for new approaches to the recruitment and assessment of law school faculty. She emphasized hands-on teaching and the human side of education, rather than intellectual heft for its own sake. Let others count angels on the head of a pin; she cared about outcomes. Her interests and, indeed, her orientation to the world were close to the ground. An emerging professional skeptic, she wanted to know how the law connected to real lives, not least to African American ones. Thus, she highlighted Ogletree’s “primary objective” as bringing “reality into the classroom.” She cited Wilkins’s efforts to demonstrate the roots of conflict and noted that Minow did whatever she could “to shake students out of the complacency of being in a classroom and to force them to think long and hard.” Describing Michelle’s own approach, Wilkins said later that she thought hard and spoke up. She listened to others, he said, and yet was “strong on what her opinions were. She was always the person who was asking the question, ‘What does this have to do with providing real access and real justice for real people? Is this fair? Is this right?’ She was always very clear on those questions.”
THE DISCUSSION MOVED from theory to practice when Michelle volunteered at Harvard’s Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run clinic for low-income clients. She worked in a small house on the edge of campus and rode a shuttle to a down-at-the-heels Boston neighborhood. The volunteers met with clients and the attorneys for the opposing party, whether a landlord, a spouse, the gas company, or perhaps a state or federal agency. They drafted pleadings and occasionally argued the issues in court. In return for hands-on experience, stude
nts were expected to devote at least twenty hours a week to their cases. For some, the bureau defined their identity. Notable bureau alumni included Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan Jr. and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Yet only a small subset of each Harvard class volunteered, about sixty students a year.
At the clinic’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration in 1988, public interest lawyer Alan Morrison suggested that all graduates should spend a year with a legal services organization after collecting their diplomas. “You can’t begin to approach the problems of the poor unless you have experienced them directly,” he said. “Working for poor people shows you the difference between the lives of the people who have to fight the system and those who simply enjoy it.” Ronald Torbert, an African American student who led the bureau during Michelle’s third year, wished more African American students were among the volunteers. “A large number of our clients are blacks and minorities. Lots of folks just don’t have the background experience to understand,” Torbert said.
Michelle worked with clients on at least six cases between September 1986 and June 1988, when she graduated. Three are listed in bureau records as family cases, a category that encompassed domestic disputes, divorce, and custody fights. Two were housing cases, which a bureau administrator said were probably evictions. One was a matter whose details are not reflected in the files. A 1988 bureau summary referred to a case in which her client’s opponent had no attorney. It said Michelle “experienced the tactical difficulty of negotiating against a pro se party in the tense emotional environment of visitation and custody issues.” In each of her cases, Michelle was the lawyer of record and would have been responsible for developing her strategy, consulting if necessary with one of the bureau supervisors. Ogletree, who ran a trial advocacy workshop, described Michelle as “tenacious.” He said Michelle’s work flowed from a sense of purpose grounded in her South Side upbringing and “a commitment to her father, who did not go to college, that she would pursue her talents to help her community.”
Supervisor Ilene Seidman recalled a visit by Michelle to a satellite court in a white, upper-crust Boston suburb. “People looked at her as though she was an exotic bird. You didn’t see women on the bench or in the courtroom in the same way you do now, and certainly not out of the city. Definitely very few women of color.” Michelle had labored over a careful memorandum for the judge, Seidman said, while the opposing counsel, a white courthouse regular, had come unprepared. “So she’s sitting very upright and serious with her beautiful memo and the other lawyer is flailing around. The judge started really admonishing the other lawyer, ‘She did this beautiful memo; you didn’t do anything.’ ” Things went well. On the forty-five-minute ride back to Cambridge in Seidman’s minivan, they replayed the events with delight. “She had just been in a situation that might have made some people justifiably angry, because she had been treated like an alien,” Seidman said. But the two women shook their heads and laughed. Michelle was “keenly aware of everything going on around her and had a very mature way of assessing what she would respond to and how.”
THE LEGAL AID BUREAU STINT was the only time in Michelle’s career when she practiced street-level law, although it was far from the last time she would pay attention to working-class Americans in need. It was a persistent dilemma, what to do with the education and opportunity presented by Princeton and Harvard. She conceded that she had been neither selfless nor particularly purposeful when she set out for Cambridge. “Law school was one of those ‘Okay, what do I do next? Don’t want to work,’ ” she said in 1996. “It was less a thoughtful experience than ‘Hey, this is a good way to develop a good income. Being a lawyer is prestigious and socially acceptable.’ ” She worked at corporate law firms in Chicago after each of her first two years at Harvard and entertained lucrative offers to start her career the same way. By the same token, the conversation about responsibility and purpose coursed through her law school years. “There was a real sense among the black students at Harvard of the old adage ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected,’ ” said Robert Wilkins, the former Black Law Students Association president. Even as they themselves were struggling with where to land, Michelle and several friends saw a vehicle in the group’s spring alumni conference, a once-substantive forum that by the mid-1980s had become little more than a social event. They decided to add a measure of meaning about the law, lawyering, and black responsibility. Areva Bell Martin, who co-chaired the 1987 gathering, said one theme “permeated” it: “You guys, this is not just about you going to a cushy firm on Wall Street and doing the fat cat part … You will be doing your community and your family a disservice if you leave here and buy your penthouse apartment and never do anything else. There’s more to your life than your own personal gain.”
The temptations of corporate law firms could be hard to resist, as Michelle was learning. Big-city firms flew Harvard students into town, put them up in fine hotels, and wined and dined them “like you wouldn’t believe. We were treated like celebrities,” said Martin, who remembered taking more than a half-dozen trips early in her Harvard career. Many students succumbed to the allure, not least some who graduated with substantial student loan debt, including Martin, whose upbringing in a St. Louis housing project was harder than most. She described the BLSA conference as an attempt to present an alternative narrative, for use immediately or later: “Yes, you’re privileged. Yes, these firms are courting you. Yes, you’ll be offered these huge salaries. But there’s more to it and don’t get caught up in it.”
The BLSA conference, as Martin and the other organizers saw it, needed to convey a sense of purpose, even as it developed into a more effective recruiting and networking event for law firms and students. The organizers set out to lure not just alumni and African Americans in private practice, but also black lawyers who had chosen public interest law, elective office, and other forms of public service. The keynote speaker in 1987 was L. Douglas Wilder, lieutenant governor of Virginia. In 1988, Michelle’s third year, it was Bruce M. Wright, a retired New York Supreme Court justice. Known for spotlighting racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Wright titled his 1996 memoir Black Justice in a White World. In 1935, Wright had been admitted to Princeton, but when he showed up on campus, administrators saw the color of his skin and refused to allow him to enroll. He sat on his trunk on the sidewalk for several hours as his father drove from New York to pick him up. Asked later why he did not protest, he replied, “I was timid then. And there was a campus police officer standing there.” Wright did receive a response in 1939 when he finally asked Princeton why he had been turned away. Radcliffe Heermance, director of admissions, replied that Princeton had a nondiscrimination policy, but that southern students in particular would not approve. “My personal experience,” Heermance wrote in a letter that Wright was carrying when the university publicly embraced him in 2001, “would enforce my advice to any colored student that he would be happier in an environment of others of his race.”
Jocelyn Frye was one of the spring conference organizers that year, joining Michelle and fellow student Karen Hardwick. Raised in Washington, D.C., the daughter of federal workers, Frye would become Michelle’s policy director in the White House. She attended the National Cathedral School and the University of Michigan before alighting at Harvard in 1985. She was glad to find a critical mass of motivated and accomplished black students who shared a number of experiences and goals. “There’s no other black student at Harvard who’s going to think ‘What the heck are you doing at Harvard?’ ” Frye said. “It was nice to be around people like that and not to feel you were being fitted in boxes that people created for you.”
Her feelings of good fortune about being at Harvard aside, Frye came to believe that the law school administration should do more on issues of diversity. “There weren’t enough of us. There weren’t enough faculty of color. I think Harvard is like any other institution that is a predominantly white institution: They are not good about d
oing a meaningful assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. They think they’re better than they are.” She went on, “We had—and we should have—higher expectations for schools that are considered the best or among the best in the country. If you want to brag about Harvard being the preeminent law school, you ought to be able to brag about Harvard being the preeminent law school with faculty and students of color.” In May 1988 many of the most active members of BLSA would take a very public step to adjust the balance.