Making a Case for Teaching Caste and Gender in Law Schools
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23220058231152431 |
| Author | Sameena Dalwai |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Making a Case for Teaching
Caste and Gender in Law Schools
Sameena Dalwai1
Abstract
This article argues for mainstreaming of caste and gender as subject matter in legal education in India.
Justice education in any country ought to introduce students to the main axis of oppression, historical
patterns of discrimination in their society—in the United States, it is race and patriarchy; in India, it
is caste patriarchy. The article connects the denial of justice in caste crimes to the invisibility of caste
in the legal discourse and insists that legal education is the key to making caste and gender visible
within the legal machinery. For this purpose, the article examines how critical race and feminist theory
informed law school education in the United States. It also elucidates the efforts of making legal
education inclusive and reflective through the national law schools experiment in India. Lastly, it
suggests ways in which caste and gender can be included in law school curricula.
Introduction
What are law schools training their students for? Are we training them to become partisan in the caste,
class, gender hierarchy of society or to become defenders of justice? All types of students enter law
schools: those who want to become corporate lawyers, who want to be criminal law luminaries and those
who want to be human rights lawyers. Law schools must offer all of these students a deeper under-
standing of society, which would assist them in becoming insightful professionals.
How to enhance law students’ comprehension of the society that we live in? Especially in the case of
future justice defenders, how to prepare them to recognize the patterns of injustices around them? How
to instil a sense of justice, along with legal training, amongst students who are preparing for criminal law
or corporate practice? How to make family law more gender just?
This article argues for making caste and gender integral to the teaching of law for a wholistic
justice education. It takes the approach that systemic biases can be confronted more effectively with
a practical understanding of daily realities, with a theoretical and historical grounding. As law
schools influence the legal profession in the most profound way, from legal content to normativity, it
is vital to introduce lawyers to a sociological understanding of caste and gender from the inception of
their journey.
Article
Asian Journal of Legal Education
10(2) 127–139, 2023
© 2023 The West Bengal National
University of Juridical Sciences
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/23220058231152431
journals.sagepub.com/home/ale
Corresponding author:
Sameena Dalwai, Jindal Global Law School, O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
E-mail: sdalwai@jgu.edu.in
1 Jindal Global Law School, O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
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