Anthony Victor Alfieri (University of Miami School of Law) has posted Response: Role Model Theory in Race-Conscious Practice, 105 Boston University Law Review 2381 (2025), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Response addresses role model theory in race-conscious practice. Building upon and extending the groundbreaking work of Professor Stacy Hawkins in #RepresentationMatters: Reviving the Role Model Theory, the Response examines the salience of race-conscious role models and fact development methods in civil rights practice and legal education. In #RepresentationMatters, Hawkins revisits race and role model theory against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education and, to a lesser extent, the Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College to mount a renewed defense of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the contexts of education and employment.
The Response parses the first of three race conscious practice lessons gleaned from the Wygant litigation. The first lesson urges the adoption of formal and informal methods of race-conscious fact development and investigation in civil rights practice. The second lesson, drawn from assessment of the nature and extent of race-conscious fact development in local, equity-based public education advocacy and civil rights litigation, directs advocates in the field of public education to devise collaborative, street level methods of race-conscious fact investigation in cooperation with teachers, staff, parents, students, and local school boards. The third lesson from the Wygant litigation is derived from evaluation of the efficacy and availability of race-conscious role models in legal education, particularly in clinical education. This third lesson confirms the pedagogical and practice efficacy of race-identity role model incongruence or mismatching within community-based, litigation and transactional clinics.
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Lawrence Solum