Only through critical legal education can we learn to be advocates for change and remake law – including IPR law – to be emancipatory.

The lesson is that in legal reasoning there is no escape from moral and political choice. If things have gone according to plan, time conveniently runs out, and the class is dismissed on that note.

* * * * *

What am I trying to accomplish in a class like this? What are the objectives of critical legal pedagogy?

Legal education should empower students. It should put them in touch with their own capacity to take control over their lives and professional education and development. It should enable them to experience the possibility of participating, as lawyers, in transformative social movements. But all too often classroom legal education is deadening. The law student‟s job, mastering doctrine, appears utterly unconnected to any process of learning about oneself or developing one‟s moral, political, or professional identity. Classroom legal education tends to reinforce a sense of powerlessness about our capacity to change social institutions. Indeed, it often induces students to feel that they are powerless to shape and alter their own legal education. Much of legal education induces in students a pervasive and exaggerated sense of the constraint of legal rules and roles and the students‟ inability to do much about it.

In capsule form, the goals of critical legal pedagogy are—

• to disrupt the socialization process that occurs during legal education;

• to unfreeze entrenched habits of mind and deconstruct the false claims of necessity which constitute so-called “legal reasoning”;

• to urge students to see their life‟s work ahead as an opportunity to unearth and challenge law‟s dominant ideas about society, justice, and human possibility and to infuse legal rules and practices with emancipatory and egalitarian content;

• to persuade students that legal discourses and practices comprise a medium, neither infinitely plastic nor inalterably rigid, in which they can pursue moral and political projects and articulate alternative visions of social organization and social justice;

• to train them to argue professionally and respectably for the utopian and the impossible;

• to alert them that legal cases potentially provide a forum for intense public consciousness-raising about issues of social justice;

• to encourage them to view legal representation as an opportunity to challenge, push, and relocate the boundaries between intra-systemic and extra-systemic activity, that is, an opportunity to work within the system in a way that reconstitutes it; and

• to show that the existing social order is not immutable but “is merely possible, and that people have the freedom and power to act upon it.”46

The most important point of the class is that social justice lawyers never give up. The appropriate response when you think you have a hopeless case is to go back and do more work in the legal medium.