Professor Ashley B. Armstrong presented her new article, “The Stories We (Don’t) Teach,” at Albany Law School’s speaker series on April 8th. “Albany provided a generous and welcoming platform to workshop my paper,” Armstrong shared. She added, “One of the attendees at the faculty workshop, Professor Dale Margolin Cecka, is a scholar whose research I engage in the article. I suggested that her work could serve as a supplementary text for educators seeking to problematize the Price Waterhouse opinion in class. Getting to speak with her about the three-part contextual method advanced in the paper was very special.”

The article been accepted for publication in the Journal of Legal Education. You can download the draft, here, on SSRN. The abstract appears below.

Abstract:

Traditional legal pedagogy implicitly reinforces the myth of law’s neutrality. In 1L classrooms, students are introduced to the law primarily through judicial opinions presented as authoritative, objective statements of doctrine.  In response, recent critical scholarship has called for a contextual case method, which advocates for pairing the study of case law with supplementary materials to surface the power dynamics, narrative omissions, and implicit biases that often remain hidden in judicial opinions. However, the literature has focused most prominently on the normative case for this approach. This Article addresses questions of implementation and operational design by offering a pragmatic, replicable framework for moving beyond an opinion’s text to examine the broader social, cultural, and institutional context of legal decisions. This approach consists of three components: (1) interrogating judicial opinions as constructed narratives; (2) supplementing opinions by assigning texts to problematize and expand students’ understanding; and (3) teaching cases “to their end” by uncovering what happened after a decision was handed down.

Pairing judicial opinions with supplementary texts enriches traditional case analysis by intentionally centering law as a narrative shaped by power, context, and whose voices are emphasized or deemphasized. Legal education is also a narrative—one comprised of choices that professors make about which stories they choose to tell or leave out of class discussion. In this way, the contextual case method is a deliberate choice to deepen students’ understanding of doctrine and the role of lawyers and judges, and to foster critical, reflective engagement with legal texts and the law itself. This Article leverages Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins—a landmark Title VII decision—as a detailed case study to demonstrate how the contextual case method can be realized with rigor and intentionality.