Welcome
Fran Ansley, Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Tennessee College of Law
Knoxville, Tennessee
ansley@utk.edu
This website is an exhibition of student work. It features selected projects
in which law students in some of my courses at the University of Tennessee have
collaborated with people in under-represented communities – at times to
explore some dimension of law and the legal system through research or education,
and at other times to participate in mounting justice claims that sought to win
individual relief or systemic change.
Since 1996 I have been experimenting with community-based field work as a tool
for teaching and learning in law school. Although the missteps and frustrations
have been many, the rewards have also been heartening and real. This page aims
to do three main things:
- to celebrate and honor some particularly vivid or instructive
examples
of work
that my students and their community partners have carried out,
- to provide ideas,
cautions, and inspiration for future law students and their
collaborators who are trying to design and achieve law-related
community
projects
of their own, and
- to share all this with other teachers, both in law schools
and elsewhere, who are interested in using similar approaches
in their teaching, research
or service.
Beyond the examples described above, which are featured in
the Permanent Collection, the site also contains a Temporary
Exhibit
Space for less elaborated exhibits, where students
enrolled in
my field work courses in the future will sometimes be invited to mount reports,
images, and
artifacts related to their community projects.
Please enjoy your visit. Your comments about the content or design
of the site are most welcome.
Acknowledgments: Many people and organizations provided crucial support to the projects that appear on this site, and visitors who venture further into it will hear about many of them. Here on the opening page, however, I want to acknowledge some key sources of inspiration and material support for the website itself. Cathy Cochran, Computer Services Librarian and Assistant Professor in the UT Law Library, and Spring Miller, my research assistant in Summer 2004, have both been important partners on this endeavor. Cathy has been involved in virtually every stage of this site's development, and she will contribute a scholarly bibliography to the permanent exhibit on spousal rape. Spring contributed in myriad ways, both technical and substantive, to the permanent exhibit on Tennessee immigrants and Criminal Justice. In 2000-2001, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning gave me a privileged year as part of an interdisciplinary cohort of fellows, regularly urging upon us a range of exciting and sophisticated examples of ways to use the web, both in our teaching and in our scholarship about our teaching. In spring 2002, the Innovative Technology Center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville awarded me a Faculty First grant that provided indispensable technical and design support. Joan Thomas at the ITC is the talented designer who gave the site its "look" and translated my initial ideas into a functioning structure. The ITC's Kathy Bennett also provided excellent advice about how web users tend to behave, and what they typically need and want. Meanwhile the University of Tennessee College of Law has stood solidly behind the effort all along the way, in more ways than can be recounted here. |
