Abstract
Whiteness is not merely a racial description. Whiteness operates as allegiance to structural racism. The quiet engine of racial hierarchy, whiteness pervades and shapes traditional legal education, rendering legal pedagogy a structurally racist enterprise. Legal education not only reproduces the racism embedded in the law and legal profession, but also obscures the ways legal doctrine, professional norms, and pedagogical practices normalize, protect, and make invisible the advantages that accrue to whiteness itself. In doing so, itproduces lawyers ill-equipped to dismantle structural injustice.
This Article breaks new ground in the scholarship on legal pedagogy by defining whiteness as it operates within legal education, analyzing the ways it manifests across legal pedagogy and professional formation, and offering legal educators a holistic methodology with actionable strategies for dismantling its influence. The Article argues that understanding whiteness requires more than identifying racialized harms topeople who are not white; it also requires examining the mechanisms through which legal education preserves and distributes white advantage.
The Article calls on legal educators to acknowledge the whiteness of law and pedagogy, to teach students to critically engage with it, and to equip them to recognize, interrupt, and dismantle its oppressive effects. In doing so, legal education can move beyond reproducing structural racism and align more fully with the broader project of racial justice.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Recommended Citation
Doron Samuel-Siegel, Dismantling the Whiteness of Legal Education, 25 Conn. Pub. Int. L. Rev. 280 (2026)
