The Law We Choose to Teach: Decolonizing the Classroom
Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series presents The Law We Choose to Teach: Decolonizing the Classroom
This conversation will begin to explore the why’s, how’s, what’s, and when’s about a teacher’s decision to decolonize the law school classroom. These decisions are not limited to what is in our syllabus and slides, but through how we teach and why.
Drawing on the work the speakers with their own scholarship and pedagogy as well as their work with the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network, Law@theMargins, the Race and the Law Institute at RWU law, we will consider how race, empire, power, and claims of objectivity shape legal education and the choices we make. The discussion will invite us to think critically about what we treat as authoritative, whose knowledge we center, and how our pedagogical choices can open up different ways of understanding and teaching law. Finally, this conversation will answer the question, why this matters.
This event is co-sponsored by Roger Williams University School of Law, City University of New York School of Law, Berkeley Law, JURIST, and Antiracist Development Institute.
1:00 - 2:00 p.m. EST
Register - The Law We Choose to Teach: Decolonizing the Classroom
In 2021, RWU Law began sponsoring an ongoing Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series in collaboration with CUNY School of Law and JURIST. Each previous installment has been attended by hundreds of legal education professionals from across the country.
View Previous Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Chaumtoli Huq
Professor of Law
CUNY School of Law
Chaumtoli Huq is a leading expert on employment and labor law, migration and human rights with a focus on social movements in the US and South Asia and the founder/Editor of an innovative law and media non-profit focused called Law@theMargins (www.lawatthemargins.com).
Her scholarship explores interrelated issues under the broad theme of Transnational Labor Law and Social Movements which includes how law and social movements interact to create emancipatory visions of global labor and human rights laws. She has produced short documentaries related to her work in Bangladesh called Sramik Awaaz: Workers Voices, and has also created a digital archive of her work on tea workers in Bangladesh called Chai Justice (https://chaijustice.com/).
Huq has devoted her professional career to public service focusing on issues impacting workers in the US and South Asia. Along with holding leadership roles at Legal Services of NYC and MFY Legal Services, she also served as Director of the first South Asian Workers’ Rights Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the first staff attorney to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
She is the 2019 Access to Justice Leadership Award by the South Asian Bar Association of New York, the 2020 Daynard Public Interest Visiting Fellowship awarded to nationally recognized public interest leaders. She was a 2023 Fulbright US Scholar in Malaga, Spain and Visiting Scholar in Sicily researching South Asian migration to Europe.
Natasha Varyani
Director of the Institute for Race and the Law
Distinguished Research Professor of Law
Roger Williams University School of Law
Natasha Varyani is the Director of the Institute for Race and the Law and Roger Williams University and the Distinguished Researched Professor of Law. With a background in private practice as a corporate tax attorney, Professor Varyani comes to teaching with a passion for helping students understand how to enter the profession ready to practice as confident, critical thinkers.
Professor Varyani has been teaching a course she developed with her colleague, Professor Malvika Seth, Corporate Colonialism, at Jindal Global Law School in Sonipat, India, as well as in The Hague. Professor Varyani is the author of "Owning Our Values: Understanding Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Property Law" and is currently working on a full Property Casebook. She is the proud daughter of immigrants, and mother of three children.
MEET THE MODERATOR
Nicole P. Dyszlewski is one of the editors of Integrating Doctrine and Diversity: Inclusion and Equity in the Law School Classroom. She currently serves as Professor & Assistant Dean for Curricular Innovation at Roger Williams University School of Law. She received a B.A. from Hofstra University, a J.D. from Boston University School of Law, and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. She is a member of the Massachusetts State Bar and the Rhode Island State Bar. Her areas of interest are mass incarceration, access to justice, and systems of race and gender inequality in law. Nicole was the 2020 recipient of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Volunteer Service Award and the 2015 recipient of the AALL Emerging Leader Award.
Register - The Law We Choose to Teach: Decolonizing the Classroom
SPECIAL ACCOMMODATIONS
Persons who, because of a special need or condition, would like to request an accommodation for an event should contact Kara Dalessio, kdalessio@rwu.edu, as soon as possible, but no later than 72 hours before the event, so that appropriate arrangements can be made.