From Theory to Transformative Practice: The Conceptual, Doctrinal, and Lawyering Dimensions of Teaching CRT
Saturday, October 25, 2025 | 11:45 am–1:15 pm | UCLA School of Law
City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law faculty will join leading scholars and educators at the Critical Race Studies 25th Anniversary Symposium & Celebration hosted by UCLA School of Law. The convening marks a milestone in the development of Critical Race Theory as a field and features panels with nationally recognized scholars examining CRT’s trajectory from academic intervention to transformative practice.
CUNY Law faculty will present on the school’s distinctive approach to embedding CRT across its curriculum, offering a model of essential pedagogy that prepares students for movement lawyering, abolitionist practice, and community-rooted advocacy. While the current proposal signals a new form of curricular integration, it continues a long tradition: since its founding, CUNY Law has embedded critical approaches to legal education, examining how race and racial justice shape the law and its practice.
About the Panel
City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law faculty offer a vision for mobilizing CRT that prepares CUNY’s diverse learning community for transformative practice in movement and abolitionist lawyering.
Since its inception in 1983, CUNY’s social justice-driven program has engaged students who are historically underrepresented in the legal profession. CUNY’s curriculum comprehensively addresses the presence of racial hierarchies in law and their intersection with other forms of legal and social subordination. CUNY’s robust clinical program embeds CRT as an animating perspective, shaping students’ professional identities in areas of practice where the effects of racism are powerfully manifest.
After George Floyd’s murder, CUNY added a mandatory CRT course to provide a shared, foundational framework for students to address how the ideology of white supremacy informs the substance of U.S. law and identify effective responses. The panel will discuss a recent proposal to expand the requirement beyond a dedicated introductory course to a pervasive curricular approach that positions faculty from different doctrinal perspectives to further engage CRT in their classes and scholarship, and more fully reflects the conceptual, doctrinal, and lawyering dimensions of the CRT-practice continuum at CUNY.
Building on CRT’s conceptual force and value as a lawyering resource, the panel presentations demonstrate this curricular commitment to support clinic and anti-colonial pedagogies, counter racial capitalism, respect the lived experiences of students, connect CRT to an anti-ableist framework, and consider the relevance of CRT to radical movements.
Faculty Panelists
Chaumtoli Huq
Professor of Law
More about Prof. Huq
Donna H. Lee
Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Family Law Practice Clinic
More about Prof. Lee
Andrea McArdle
Professor of Law
More about Prof. McArdle
Jeena Shah
Professor of Law
More about Prof. Shah
Marbré Stahly-Butts
Assoc. Professor of Law
More about Prof. Stahly-Butts
Jared M. Trujillo
Assoc. Professor of Law
More about Prof. Trujillo
By participating in this symposium, CUNY Law faculty underscore the school’s national leadership in reimagining legal education through critical pedagogy and preparing lawyers for transformative practice in movement and abolitionist lawyering.