As part of 1L Orientation, we offer a program called “Delaware Law Engages” where incoming students have an opportunity to read or watch a selected book or medium, then discuss topics and scenarios relevant to law and society. The primary goal of DLS’s Delaware Law Engages is to provide students, staff, and faculty a shared encounter with race, ethnicity, and legal justice issues, engendering greater awareness and understanding as well as conversations, both informal and formal. This year, we have chosen the Defamation Experience.
Defamation Experience Program Description
When race, class, gender, and the law collide, a conversation begins. The Defamation Experience challenges our preconceived notions with a riveting courtroom drama that holds our prejudices and assumptions under a powerful lens. As a member of the jury, you will learn as much or more about yourself as you do about the plaintiff and the defendant.
Watch the trailer on the Orientation page and come ready to engage.
Previous Books
For several years, we have used the book, Multicultural Lawyering: Navigating the Culture of the Law, the Lawyer, and the Client by Kimberly E. O'Leary and Mable Martin-Scott as the focus of Delaware Law Engages with additional programming centered around Multicultural Lawyering throughout the year. This book is a mix of policy, legal history, professionalism, and lawyering skills. It explores multiculturalism, the reasons behind calls for diversity in the legal profession, the culture of the law.; and considers implicit bias, examines how to best navigate one’s own culture as a person interacts with legal systems, and how to best represent clients with a particular focus on understanding and translating a client’s goals, values and culture into legal system values and culture, while one remains cognizant of their own values and cultures. Case studies are included in the book.
During several prior 1L Orientation sessions (2023 & 2024), students were assigned to read pp. 56-58 (top paragraph only on p. 58) and pp. 133-162 on bias; with the orientation topic/discussion focused on bias.
For the 2021-2022 academic year, the DEI Committee selected the book Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, by Professor Bob Hayman of the Delaware Law School and Professor Leland Ware, Professor of African Studies and the Louis L. Redding Chair for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware. Choosing Equality focuses on the legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, both from a national perspective and also in the unique context of the Delaware experience, as Delaware contributed two of the five cases consolidated for the Supreme Court's consideration in Brown. The book is available for purchase by students through the Widener bookstore or a copy can be purchased here.
During 1L Orientation, held in August 2021, Professor Hayman presented a one-hour program with video segments by Professor Ware, along with Dan Atkins, Executive Director of Community Legal Aid Society, Inc. (CLASI). The program provided a brief introduction to equality issues raised by the book and explained why those issues are still important. Dan Atkins discussed a significant post-book development - the very recent CLASI/ACLU litigation for educational equality in Delaware.
Everyone is invited to read the book; talk about it with fellow law students, DLS faculty and staff; and watch for an announcement about an upcoming Public Education Seminar and panel discussion hosted by the Delaware Barristers on the topic of Re-segregation of Delaware Public Schools, sponsored by DLS and the DEI Committee in November 2021!