This fall, Roger Williams University School of Law will become one of just a handful of law schools nationwide to introduce a new required course on the subject of “Race & the Foundations of American Law” to its core legal curriculum. 

Of those schools, RWU Law is one of the first to have already piloted its course as a spring elective. According to the school’s description, the course is designed to provide “both a historical overview and a current assessment of how race has played a role in American law and provide critical analytic tools students can bring to all aspects of their legal education and future practice.”

“Offering this course aligns perfectly with our institution’s larger social justice mission. It is something we needed to do, something transformative, something that will better equip our graduates to work within the legal system to create a world that is more equitable for all.”

Since the adoption of RWU Law’s Strategic Plan for Diversity & Inclusion in 2017, the law school has been working to address issues of inequality and social justice as a core part of the curriculum. Students, and in particular members of the school’s chapter of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), have made clear that they care deeply about seeing the law school further that commitment.

“In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, BLSA students told us that we needed to do more to help educate all students about the ways in which the legal system perpetuates racial hierarchies,” said Professor Jared Goldstein, RWU Law’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. “The faculty agreed that we should create a required course on race and the law, one that every student would take. Making this change will help us carry out the mission we have long been dedicated to.” Goldstein explained that the class – which will be a required part of the second-year curriculum –provides a service to students by introducing them to the real world in which American law has evolved.

In June 2020, the RWU Law faculty voted to create the course for piloting in spring 2021. It was introduced as an elective in the spring 2021 semester, co-taught by Professors Diana Hassel, Nadiyah Humber, and Nicole Dyszlewski.

Students gave positive reviews.

“In my 19 years of formal education, this was the best and most eye-opening class I’ve ever taken,” said Brooklyn Crockton, a rising third-year RWU Law student from Rochester, N.Y. “When the course started, I thought I knew a lot more than I did, because I am African-American myself. I thought I had a good grasp of how the law intersects with African-American issues and history, because I grew up with it. But I’d say about 90 percent of the course content was totally new to me – and I was a Africana Studies minor, too.”

Dominick Gargano, a third-year RWU Law student from Morristown, N.J., said that as a white male he felt no sense of “indoctrination.”

“What we were really studying in this class is history, factual information,” he said. “It’s not a ‘version’ of something, or an interpretation. We’re doing what we do in every other law class: looking at the facts. And you deal with that information, and then you start to think about what we can do make things better.”