Queering Law: The transformational possibilities of joy in the law school classroom

Abstract

This paper explores how arts-based approaches to legal education can, through a queer lens, challenge what counts as legitimate forms of knowledge in the law school classroom. I argue that when students are invited to step into the “frame” of their learning, they enhance their ethical imaginations and nurture empathy, creativity, and an anti-oppressive sensibilities, capacities that often receive little attention in legal education despite their importance to the work that lawyers do. With the results of a Fall 2024 study with UVic Law alumni in hand, I examine the relationship between the skills and competencies graduates use in their daily professional lives and the courses, teaching methods, and forms of evaluation they encountered as students, and argue for a thicker pedagogical toolkit. Drawing on ongoing work that positions the television series Heated Rivalry as a jurisprudential text, I consider what joy makes possible in conversations about some of the most difficult questions of our time. When students engage with visual media through affect, emotion, and embodiment, learning is arguably more meaningful. By creating space for arts-based encounters, law school classrooms can become sites of unexpected insight and transformation for students and teachers alike.