Lawyering Landscapes: Lawyers as Constituents of Landscape

Abstract

Landscape and law cross-influence each other. Legal rules shape landscapes, while landscapes shape the culture from which rules emerge. In describing this interplay, landscape can seem passive, as a canvas on which laws paint visions of society; or active, as a matrix for the creation of law and culture. An alternative view is suggested: landscapes are opportunities for action, fields within which individuals interact with context in a mutually adaptive relationship. Lawyers are specialized constituents of this adaptation. Lawyers' acts and practices help to constitute the adaptations that shape a given landscape. A teaching module in which it was sought to prompt law students to become aware of the adaptive role of lawyering in landscape is described. The results suggest useful theoretical and methodological insights into landscape as a field of human activity, and the need for further study of lawyering as a force in the construction of landscape.

Keywords:

• Landscape
• lawyering
• action
• constructing landscape

Notes

We acknowledge the insights of structuration theory here (Pred, 1984). However, we want to examine the explicit interaction between landscape, individuals and the particular discourse/framework of the law.

In focusing on ethics (Martin & Scherr, 2004), we examine how individual discourses of personal values served as the prism through which students processed conflicting influences in landscapes. We consider the spatial understandings of students before, during and after conducting field work on the racialized distribution of housing (also described in this paper). In that separate discussion, we analyse how students personalized disputes over spatial patterns through debates and conflicts over personal values, and how they largely avoided assessments of systemic social biases. In effect, students constructed a moral and ethical rhetoric with which to absorb the conflict in discourses about landscapes. For more information on this aspect of our findings, along with a more detailed description of the pedagogical module, see Martin & Scherr (2004).

They have included such topics as gendered lawyering, class disparities, consumer transactions, health and mental health, and legalized care-taking (including child custody, elder law and involuntary commitment). During the year we delivered this module; the theme involved racialized lawyering, and students had been asked to read and apply a series of texts focused on the interplay of racism both with primary law and with personal assumptions about racism.

Before teaching, we planned out five separate routes (or ‘transects’) through the school's home city. These transects ran from a single, central location on campus, out to the city borders and backwards along a slightly separate route.

At some point during the exercise, many students questioned the racial assumptions underlying the exercise itself, arguing that, in looking for racial conclusions, the exercise (and perhaps even the professors) embodied racist assumptions. This discomfort with the interplay between observing racism and being racist represents in our view another aspect of the ambivalence this teaching module elicited from students.

We sought to counteract this silence about the law in the concluding classes of the module, by presenting a series of classes on the role of law and legal rules in designing the landscape, including an historical explanation for the emergence of racially segregated housing, along with a review of recent law review literature focusing on how legal rules serve to reinforce class and racial patterns in the housing market.

Practicum students engage in regular self-reflective writing on their experiences in the class, as part of their preparation for more effective self-guidance as a lawyer (Ogilvy, 1996; Schön, 1983). These ‘journals’ occur at pre-determined stages in the semester, about 1/3, 2/3 and at the end of each semester.

See Pomerantz (1996) and Greene (1991).

The students' sense of their home spaces was established through an exercise of mental mapping. Martin & Scherr (2004) discuss this process in detail.

We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing our conclusions in this direction.