Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2020

Abstract

Professor Akilah Folami:
Welcome and thank you for coming. I am eager to engage in this opening exchange with Susan Sturm today in hopes that it will help bring to surface some of the issues that undergird the conversations planned for today in the panels. So let us begin. Susan has been teasing out a series of paradoxes that she argues develops in the tensions built into lawyer-leadership, i.e., legal training and leadership development. Her work on these lawyer-leadership paradoxes grows out of her other work that is related to the theme of this conference: Leading Differently Across Difference. She will briefly discuss one or more of these paradoxes and then she and I will build upon them in what we hope will be a very organic conversation that has been going on between us before now.

Professor Susan Sturm:
I have been writing, teaching, and working with organizations that have been struggling with how to address bias in their systems: law schools, court systems, community colleges, business schools, and liberal arts colleges. These organizations have often gotten stuck in attempts to do this work of dismantling bias. I argue that the stuck-ness is really, in part, a function of grappling with contradictory ideas and contradictory challenges that they are trying to resolve but that cannot be resolved but have to be held together nevertheless. These are paradoxes. Paradoxes are two conflicting and opposing ideas that actually also are both true and have to be pursued together.

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Gender

Comments

© 2020 Hofstra Law Review. Reprinted with permission from the Hofstra Law Review Association.

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