EXP: Disrupting Systems (Sutcliffe)
Faculty
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| Emily R. Sutcliffe Assistant Dean emilysut@law.upenn.edu |
Additional Information
Experiential CourseYes
Skills Training
Oral Presentations
Team Projects
Other Professional Skills:
Grading
25% Participation,
75% Other (Reflective writing - 25%
Final presentation - 50%)
With Permission of Instructor
Class meets in person.
Course Continuity
Students are encouraged to stay home if you are ill or experience flu-like symptoms. If you miss a class for any reason, it is still your responsibility to make up the work missed.
I offer the following to students who miss class due to illness:
- If you are absent, due to illness or some other unavoidable circumstance, email me and I can ask for volunteers among your classmates to share their notes with you.
- I will make PowerPoint slides or other class materials routinely available on the course site to everyone in the class.
- If you are absent due to illness or some other unavoidable circumstance, email me and I can make PowerPoint slides or other class materials available to you.
Meeting Times/Location
T 11:00AM - 12:59PM
Tanenbaum Hall 142
Category
Seminar
Credits
3.0
Disrupting Systems: Examining the Origins of Power and the Architecture of Change
The converging crises of recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing racial injustice, deepening economic disparity, and escalating political polarization, have laid bare the persistent inequities embedded within the cyclical nature of our culture and the systems it creates. In this context, calls for justice require not only demands for reform, but broader efforts to interrogate and reimagine foundations of power in the United States. Beyond symbolic gestures, what conditions are necessary for lasting change to take root at individual, institutional, and cultural levels?
This course investigates how historical and current distributions of power, often refracted through lenses of race, gender, social class, religion, and ability, can maintain or disrupt the structural imbalances that entrench injustice and create barriers to meaningful change. It provides opportunities to explore how our individual positionality to power impacts the ways we engage with the law and our roles in perpetuating and/or disrupting systems of oppression. Situated within a cross-disciplinary and history-informed framework, this course seeks to advance students’ practical understanding of how a reflective and critical consciousness around power can catalyze effective advocacy and help to foster just policies, pedagogies, and practices. Class format will include brief lectures to introduce and frame concepts, student-led discussions about assigned readings and visual media, and vignette-based exercises. This course will draw heavily on key contributions from scholars within the fields of Law, Education, Psychology, Anthropology, and Restorative Justice. Students will be encouraged to think beyond traditional frameworks of advocacy and consider how law can be (and has been) mobilized to support transformative social change.
Prerequisite: This course is open to law students and students from other graduate schools at Penn.
Perspectives on the Law Learning outcomes: Demonstrate an understanding of how the law affects, and is affected by, the individual course topic; Perform legal analysis in the context of the individual course topic; Communicate effectively on the legal and other aspects of the individual course topic; Demonstrate the ability to use other disciplines to analyze legal issues relevant to the individual course topic, including economics, philosophy, and sociology, as appropriate.
Public Interest Learning outcomes: Demonstrate a core understanding of the varied legal aspects of public interest law; Perform legal analysis in the context of public interest law; Communicate effectively on topics related to public interest law; Demonstrate an understanding of how public interest law is connected to and affected by a wide variety of legal and regulatory structures and doctrines.