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ISSN Impreso 1390-8863 ISSN Digital 2737-6133

Cálamo 22
Enero 2025

Urban Legal Education: Bridging Theory, Practice, and Place

URBAN LEGAL EDUCATION: BRIDGING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND PLACE
Interview with Nisha Mistry Esp., MSc.*

EDUCACIÓN JURÍDICA URBANA: UNIENDO TEORÍA, PRÁCTICA Y LUGAR
Entrevista con Nisha Mistry Esp., MSc.

EDUCAÇÃO JURÍDICA URBANA: UNINDO TEORIA, PRÁTICA E LUGAR
Entrevista com Nisha Mistry Esp., MSc.

Entrevista realizada de forma virtual, por la plataforma Zoom, transcrita y editada
Septiembre de 2024

* Nisha Mistry, tiene un B.A. en Ciencias Políticas por la Barnard College, es Juris Doctor (J.D.), Law (especializada en derecho y desarrollo económico)
por la Northeastern University, y es Máster en Diseño de Ciudades por la London School of Economics. Es una dedicada defensora del desarrollo
urbano equitativo, con más de quince años de experiencia, ha trabajado con organizaciones como LISC y Brookings Metro para aplicar estrategias
que promuevan las oportunidades económicas en las ciudades. Nisha fundó Fulkee LLC para continuar su misión de crear comunidades prósperas e
inclusivas. Desde agosto de 2022 hasta la actualidad es Assistant Professor of Practice en la Cleveland State University. http://nishamistry.com

** Abogado por la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (2013), máster en Diseño de Ciudades por la London School of Economics (2015), magíster
en derecho administrativo por el Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (2023) y cuenta con un diplomado de Transiciones Energéticas para enfrentar
el cambio climático por la Universidad EAN (2023). Se desempeña como investigador y consultor jurídico y urbanista, experto en desarrollo urbanís-
tico y gobiernos locales. Ha trabajado como consultor de vivienda y ciudades para el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo y el Banco Mundial, y fue
investigador para la Fundación Konrad Adenauer en temas de ciudades inteligentes y el análisis de retos estructurales del Ecuador. Cuenta con amplia
experiencia brindando asesoría técnica sobre gobernanza, derecho urbanístico y planificación urbana a gobiernos locales, así como en el desarrollo de
planes de gobierno para campañas políticas de municipios. Correo electrónico: aaorbea@gmail.com. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5891-2080

Cómo citar esta entrevista: Orbea, Álvaro. 2025. “Urban Legal Education: Bridging Theory, Practice, and Place. Interview with Nisha
Mistry Esp., MSc.”. Revista de estudios jurídicos Cálamo, núm. 22: 106-114.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.61243/calamo.22.442

Álvaro Orbea**

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Álvaro Orbea

Keywords: Urban planning; Law and city; Law teach-
ing; Urban Law teaching; Urban development

Palabras clave: Planificación urbana; Derecho y ciu-
dad; Enseñanza del Derecho; Enseñanza del Derecho
urbano; Desarrollo urbano

Palavras-chave: Planejamento Urbano; Direito e a
Cidade; Educação em Direito; Educação em Direito
Urbano; Desenvolvimento Urbano; Planejamento Ur-
bano; Desenvolvimento Urbano

ÁLVARO ORBEA (AO): In Ecuador, since the 2008
Constitution, constitutional law has become crucial
for urban development, with the Constitutional
Court ruling on urban planning and municipalities’
responsibilities regarding the right to the city. Given
that the Court often relies on multiple disciplines
due to limited urban expertise among lawyers, how
do you teach the relationship between law and urban
development to students from various academic
backgrounds?

NISHA MISTRY (NM): At Cleveland State University,
I teach non-law undergraduate students in the broad
and encompassing areas of urban studies and public
administration. Many of my students go on to pursue
work or further training in a field that is conventionally
‘urban’ – for example, urban planning, city government,
or NGO management. I also have many students whose
interests lie in the arts, health services, engineering, or
entrepreneurship. And, certainly, some of my students
do choose to pursue law after graduation.

I have discovered that, whatever their primary discipline,
my students have a natural curiosity about how cities
came to be and how billions of people carry on living in
cities. They want to explore what ‘progress’ means to those
who live in a city and what isn’t going so well. They want
to know how cities are managed. Who makes decisions
that affect the public buses they take to class? Or their
access to fresh food? Or rental housing? Students enter
my classroom with an inkling that there are answers to
these questions. They know that ‘the city’ did not pop up
like a mushroom out of the ground! It was formed, over
time, from human intention and discretion.

What students typically lack –and what lawyers (along
with planners, architects, designers, and others)

possess– are methods and tools to investigate their
surroundings. The ability to organize and analyze
evidence, for instance, is inherent in legal and city
making processes.

So, I start with students’ observations and experiences
of ‘place.’ I shift their awareness from the seemingly
mundane logistics of city life to an analysis of the
city writ large, including sites and structures and the
practical matter of how things get done. The connection
to law is less obvious – it’s buried– but it’s there. I try to
reveal the relevance of law in everyday urban life in a
way that is organic and accessible but still systematic.

While interdisciplinarity is fundamental to my
teaching philosophy, I try to avoid overusing this
term, because on its own, it doesn’t mean much.
Instead, I begin by defining ‘the urban’ as human
settlement-making, a basic aspect of human existence
and our instinct to shape our habitats. Our urban
reality, stretching back 10,000 years, emerged from
our ability to combine different types of knowledge,
from language and caretaking to construction and
conflict resolution. Ancient cities like Jericho,
Constantinople, Mohenjo-daro, and Teotihuacan were
built on ‘interdisciplinarity’; it is what has enabled
humans to endure. I start my introductory courses
with lessons on Earth’s oldest cities, examining the
parallel tracks of human and urban development.
These aren’t separate phenomena; they’re inherently
linked. And law isn’t an external force on human and
urban development; it has been interdependent with
these forces. All this predates our modern academic
categories and buzz words Cities serve as mirrors of
humanity, reflecting our needs, values, talents, and
contradictions. Students understand and appreciate
this.

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Urban Legal Education: Bridging Theory, Practice, and Place

Lastly, I will say that my teaching philosophy flows
from my work as a practitioner and my regard for
socioeconomic and spatial inclusion. I spent the first
15 years of my career working to broaden the base of
homegrown economic opportunity in urban areas with
too few ladders to good jobs and mainstream markets.
My hope is that students leave university with practical
skills and confidence in their ability to apply urban,
legal, and policy concepts.

AO: Given the increasing trend toward specialization
in law where expertise in specific areas is highly valued,
how does this reconcile with your interdisciplinary
teaching approach? How do you balance this tension,
particularly in contexts where judges specialize in
specific legal subjects yet must engage with multiple
disciplines? How does interdisciplinarity interact
with the push for specialization in legal practice and
decision-making?

NM: Let me address two key points here. First,
regarding specialization, for instance in legal practice
and legislative drafting: this is technical work that
requires precise expression and implementation. Legal
drafting specifically shows why specialization matters:
terminology can become outdated or inaccurate,
timing dimensions can be confused, and models might
be inappropriately applied to local contexts; something
we often see when people adopt model language
without considering human needs and realities.

Specialization makes sense, in many cases, because
it means there is an ability to carefully consider and
account for context; that is, to move from a broader to
more contextualized sense of a reality or situation. If
you are an individual or community whose grievance is
moving through the justice system, you want those with
power over the outcome to work within context, specifics,
not generalities. Shared definitions and specialized
demarcations are not just formalistic or symbolic;
they can be meaningful for a robust rule of law. Also,
there are instances in which a lack of specialization –or
a vacuum of contextualized knowledge– can be quite
dangerous.

This brings us to the matter of ethics; and, in this instance,
judicial ethics. I do believe that a judge’s duty to serve

the public good first compels an ethical, not technical,
analysis around a set of facts. Ethical norms should
dictate the way any knowledge –specialized or general–
is applied. So, it is less a question of whether a judge or
legal officer should tap different ‘expert’ opinions. What
does the case dictate, in an ethical sense? There may be
a duty to be more expansive or more targeted. Also, I
want to mention that respect for, and engagement with,
embodied knowledge –for example, the knowledge
held by someone who’s experienced forced housing
displacement or a chronic illness– matters immensely.

Secondly, while tension may exist, as I see it,
specialization is not an absence of, or counterpoint to,
interdisciplinarity. Yes, we need specialists who stay
current, who are always ‘refreshing’ the data. But legal
professionals (including judges) can expand on their
specialties and diversify their knowledge bases. There
are options –such as supplemental training, continuing
professional education, and peer-learning circles. It can
only benefit legal practice, and therefore society, when
diverse competencies are used to develop culturally
relevant and ethically grounded frameworks and
models– for instance, for rulemaking or drafting.

Again, though, there’s an ethical dimension here: subject
matter must be expressed with appropriate care. In
environmental matters, for instance, law should follow
science, keeping pace with both scientific advances and
evolving norms. It’s a continuous cycle of refining a
knowledge base with the goal of enhancing the public
good.

AO: What are the strengths and weaknesses in how
traditional law is taught, particularly in relation to
becoming an urban practitioner? Some lawyers are
urban practitioners, while others must deal with
urban issues at some point. What do you think are
the strengths and weaknesses in dealing with urban
issues, regardless of whether one is a judge, attorney,
or urban planner?

NM: Drawing from my experience working in city
government in New York and New Jersey I’ve seen how
legal activity permeates the workings of local governance,
even where legal training is not formally required (for
example, consider the role of non-lawyer procurement

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officers). At the municipal level, there’s a daily dialogue
with law across public agencies and departments:
planning, housing, transportation, utilities. This circular
dialogue between lawyers and non-lawyers moves at a
pace and intensity I haven’t witnessed anywhere else. I
have seen again and again the ways in which this kind
of environment is so educational for young lawyers and
planners; it’s a unique training in law that’s arguably
harder to get at federal levels, or in centralized systems.

As the first person to attend law school in my Indian
immigrant family, I initially assumed that I would
practice immigration law. I was a New Yorker in my
final year of college during the 9/11 attack and was
quite shaken, as a new graduate, about the direction
my country was pursuing with respect to immigration
policy. Urban development wasn’t on my mind. Also,
frankly, immigration lawyers were the only lawyers
I knew!

Something changed for me as a law student, specifically,
while studying Property Law under Professor Rashmi
Dyal-Chand at Northeastern. I realized that there was
a critical lack of diversity and representation on zoning
boards and planning commissions; bodies like these
had shaped the multiracial yet segregated communities
I grew up in. These professionals quietly set the
terms for land use and siting, housing and economic
development. Law school offered me a view into these
unseen workings of local development and led me to
merge my interests in law, planning, and community/
economic development.

Legal training –with its distinct analytical tools,
methods, doctrine, and vocabularies– is uniquely
valuable. It needs to be infused, though, with a civic
consciousness. I happened to benefit from an expansive,
socially engaged legal education at Northeastern
University in Boston. As students, we learned the law
in its most technical sense, but we were also required
to consider its historical basis and what it means for
pluralist democracy (that is, issues of social difference
and disparity).

I believe that this gave me a flexible, rather than
restrictive foundation for understanding how places
are changed by legal decision making. And, as I remind

my students, such change is not easily reversed! The
demolition of a blighted building does not undo the
effects of that building.

A weakness of traditional legal education is that it can,
when too narrow and formalistic, erase the profound
role of place in people’s lives. The legal imagination –an
extension of human imagination– and legal practice are
worse off when ‘place’ is neglected. Civic imagination
also takes a hit. For this reason, I am a believer in place-
based education across disciplines, including in law
school. This approach deals, fully and rigorously, with
physical places. It extends the walls of the classroom to
the city.

This approach is inherent in many forms of urban
training. Landscape architects, for instance, are
required to reconcile the parcel printed on a map with
the conditions they observe at street level. This is a
normal mode of learning for those in subjects such
as environmental science or geography. However, law
students are too often limited to case and code-based
learning. Then, there is the dependence on digital
devices, which can flatten urban and legal learning.
All of this, together, silently implies that a spatial
understanding of the city is not that important for
lawyers. I disagree with this premise.

Are there barriers to place-based education in the legal
academy? Certainly. It may be seen as unconventional.
Also, I know from my experience teaching in Cleveland
the time and effort required to design new courses
–such as those that utilize the city as a classroom or
that involve community partners. Moreover, I realize
that sometimes– depending on the setting – some
people are concerned about student safety or comfort.
Nonetheless, I think that, in most cases, these issues are
resolvable, and that even some small, incremental steps
in the direction of more place-based learning could
benefit law students.

I am eager to see how legal education transforms in
the years ahead in Ecuador and whether cities are
given a more central and active role in the classroom.

AO: How has your experience in both Global North
and South contexts shaped your understanding of

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Urban Legal Education: Bridging Theory, Practice, and Place

different legal frameworks in urban development?
As both professor and practitioner, how do you
view the relationship between understanding local
legal frameworks versus understanding the places
themselves? What role do these legal frameworks
play in shaping urban development across different
global contexts?

NM: I think law fulfills its highest potential, and
lawyers do their best work, when they first face the
reality of how life is lived in a place. The same goes for
urban planners. I’ll borrow words from Jan Gehl, an
urban designer from Copenhagen who many years ago
found himself disillusioned by architectural practice.
Gehl’s philosophy –which I subscribe to– is, first, you
start with life, and then you move to buildings. Don’t
start with buildings and then move to life. Norman
Krumholz, who led city planning in Cleveland in the
1970s, had a similar outlook: that city development
should, in practice, be human centered. I see this
approach as universally relevant, as enabling a set of
values–values expressed in a ‘right to the city.’

Now, building on this values-based approach, legal
frameworks for urban development have two basic
functions. They need to expand –or at least attempt
to expand– options for those residents who have too
few options today. They must also create practical
guidelines aimed at the long-term viability of urban
systems that are facing all kinds of strain, such as (in
the case of Quito) extreme weather events. This is a
kind of norm-setting and steering function.

Unfortunately, in parts of the Global North, as well
as across the Global South, those holding the elegant
city plans and blueprints are, all too often, neither
delivering workable short-term solutions nor setting
conditions for economic equity and accountability over
the long term. The inadequate state of public transit in
many cities and metro regions around the world is an
example of this fact. That is what I see, as an urbanist
following threads across global contexts.

That said, I think it would be wrong to overlook the
complexity and nuances within this Global North/South
framing. Some residents of areas in the Global South
have better life expectancies than Black Americans in

the Global North, reflecting centuries-old structural
disparities. Also, returning to the example of public
transit: some high-poverty areas are better serviced than
other high-poverty areas, due to historical patterns of
political influence and public investment. So, wherever
possible, frameworks should address fairness even
between disadvantaged areas.

Migration illustrates these complexities well. In
the Global North, there are competing narratives
immigrants as urban revitalizers versus and immigrants
and burden-creators. The Global South faces similar
tensions, particularly around conflict and climate
migration. In some cases, a given ‘migration narrative’
may influence legal analysis and decision making.

Ecuador’s constitutional right to the city is powerful,
but enshrining rights differs from operationalizing
them. Urban development must include good jobs
and equitable mobility to constitute real growth.
Urban development without good jobs and equitable
connectivity and mobility isn’t real growth. We still
see many cities benchmarked based on quality-of-life
indicators that are explicitly about the location and
expansion of multinational corporations. My work has,
in part, been about promoting independently owned
small businesses in cities; there’s a difference between
a framework that focuses on promoting homegrown
local businesses and one that prioritizes multinational
expansion. These frameworks might, for instance, deal
with incentives, investment, or the regional workforce.
Law has a central role in all of this. Consider the
example of procurement: it’s a major driver in how a
city can support a local economic value and locally
supplied goods and services.

Finally, law needs to be clear about what constitutes
state action and government action, as the urban reality
now involves many third-party actors and partners. We
should look to law to be clear and compelling in how
it addresses a city’s priorities and how a city develops
those priorities.

AO: Given that two-thirds of Quito’s workers are
in the informal economy, how do legal frameworks
handle this reality in urban development? While
legislation typically focuses on regulating the visible

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Álvaro Orbea

formal sector (like construction and real estate
companies), how do you address the challenge of
the informal sector being excluded from both legal
benefits and drafting processes? Could you share
examples from your experience about how legal
structures impact urban development in cities with
significant informal economies?

NM: There’s no question that the scale of informality
in Ecuador speaks to a difficult global reality that is
absolutely tied up in urban law. Over the years, I’ve
given a lot of consideration to the conundrum you’re
describing: law is developmentally necessary but
also casts this shadow over the lives of people whose
circumstances corner them into ‘extralegality.’

My take on this has been shaped by the work of many,
many others. I’ve been influenced by the work of
Amartya Sen, law professor Rashmi Dyal-Chand and
Justice Zione Ntaba of the High Court of Malawi. My
thinking has also been shaped by postcolonial writing
on urbanism and ‘belonging’ and my own time spent
in Indian cities; including in Mumbai, where as a law
student, I participated in a human-rights fact finding
following an unlawful demolition in an area known as
Mandala (Mankhurd), where 5,000 households were
forcibly displaced overnight.

Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, famously
argued that legally formalizing the poor’s informal
activities in the Global South would unleash capital
‘flowing in the streets’ –a wealth-generating revolution.
However, twenty years later, there’s little evidence that
widespread property formalization or transitioning
workers to the formal sector necessarily improves
social welfare. I want to be clear: I am not suggesting
that workers who are trapped in casual or irregular
employment in the Global South are adequately
protected, from a rights standpoint, or that they are
‘better off ’ being informal; not at all. However, there
is research that indicates that poverty alleviation is
possible in the midst of informality– and, on the flip
side, that formalization alone does not drive poverty
alleviation.

Consider the United States, a case study highlighted in
Professor Dyal-Chand’s work: despite evolving from a

frontier settler society (through indigenous conquest
and subjugation) to one with widespread formal
housing ownership and employment, we haven’t yet
resolved income inequality. In fact, inequality in this
part of the Global North has grown in recent years.

However, there are positive examples globally. In
South Africa, informal (extralegal) waste pickers
who cleaned streets without formal recognition were
able to gain access to government contracts through
significant advocacy and participatory measures. So,
in this way, municipalities can create legal frameworks
that enable informal workers to access formal markets
while remaining extralegal.

But we must question the scale of reform we’re seeking.
It’s progress when a waste-collection collective gains
market access. However, a community needs to
consider the scale and type of social impact it wishes
to pursue. Small business entrepreneurship and
procurement-market access, while important –and an
area I’ve worked in– still have limitations in creating
broader social equity impacts.

AO: Given your work with community engagement in
urban planning, what legal structures facilitate more
meaningful public participation in urban decision-
making processes, particularly for marginalized
communities? You’ve mentioned one example, but
are there others from your experience?

NM: Let me address this through the lens of land use
and zoning. When it comes to effective land politics
and land use law, if we use the methodology of “let’s
start with life and then introduce the law”, we need to
ask: what is the relationship between the community
and the land? What is it and what does a community
want it to be? We understand land in market terms,
but all these other dimensions –social value, catalytic
value, the sense of long-term security– are oftentimes
very contested.

From my years working on urban industrial
revitalization strategy, I’ve seen key challenges. In
New York City, for instance, I have seen hotels and
retail establishments encroaching on historically
industrial areas and threatening good manufacturing

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Urban Legal Education: Bridging Theory, Practice, and Place

jobs. While warehousing typically offers lower-wage
jobs with less local economic circulation, small to
medium-scale manufacturing can provide better-
paying jobs and shift toward greener processes. This
has sparked advocacy for more protective zoning that
prioritizes a higher density of good industrial jobs.

I’ll share a practice from the discipline of landscape
architecture that I love and teach my students: the
method of ground truthing. Just last week, I was out
in Cleveland with my students studying city-owned
vacant sites. This kind of education –site-based,
community-engaged project work– is something
students of every discipline, including law students,
can benefit from. Ground truthing is the practice of
matching up what you see in Google Maps and city
databases with what you’re observing at the street
level and on the site. But that’s just one part; there also
must be conversations with residents, as well as rooted
community organizations and institutions. There are
many different methodologies that can augment the
kind of information you obtain from desk research,
which is what I was trained in as a lawyer.

While this might not seem novel or profound to many
people, I think we need to be doing more of it. Since
my time as a student, it seems there’s been more of a
shift toward considering law in connection with place
and social systems. This is quite positive, I think.

AO: Your emphasis on ‘life before law’ is compelling
and presents unique challenges in Global South
contexts like Ecuador. While we’ve made progress
in formalizing informal neighborhoods, these
communities often remain excluded from broader
discussions about wellbeing and services, even
after receiving formal titles. Given that formal data
often doesn’t exist for informal areas, and cities
face significant resource constraints, how can we
effectively gather and incorporate information from
these communities in planning and decision-making
processes?

NM: Yes, the outright absence of resources is a very
real problem. Your question brings me back to research
I did many years ago on World Bank lending in the
Global South. When I was looking at this through a

legal lens, I was particularly interested in the Mumbai
Urban Transport Project, which was at that time the
largest such transport investment by the World Bank
in Asia. I wanted to understand the extent to which
they were operationally aligned with local conditions
in delivering this money and supporting the project.
What I found was a dissonance between the World
Bank’s operational parameters for the municipality
and what was happening in terms of how their staff
and field workers did their daily work.

Now, removing World Bank funding from the picture
and looking at situations where there’s a vacuum of
investment, I think there are two key approaches. First,
starting with what might be possible or easier given
current conditions, there should be better training of
municipal workers and local advocates – people who
are doing what can sometimes be poorly compensated
or unstable work. Through university partnerships and
other collaborations, there could be enhancement of
abilities or advisory support to existing staff. For example,
at Cleveland State University, I supervise projects where
student researchers add value to real-time city initiatives.
Through these kinds of meaningful and analytically
contained projects, there can be some boost to a city in
the form of knowledge sharing and peer learning.

My universal concern is that there are often more
incentives and better compensation for people to join
federal or national government versus working locally.
I’d like to see that change. Every city needs to examine
how to build better pathways from school systems into
local leadership and city management.

Lastly, I believe there is enough capital in the world, even
in many Global South countries, but the geography of
capital –how it moves and on what terms– often doesn’t
create cities where most residents feel uplift or change.
There’s cutting-edge policy work being done, including
by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, around local
revenue generation and legal strategies for financing
local infrastructure. Lawyers are at the center of
redesigning revenue generation strategies, whether it’s
land value capture or tweaks to property tax structure.

However, I disagree with situations where most
residents have to shoulder this question about resources

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and investment. If over one-half of Ecuador’s society
is working extra-legally for very little, just navigating
basic needs while facing numerous obstacles, we need
to rethink where we’re putting demands on average
residents to participate in transforming resource
structure and allocation. In that sense, law must do
better; but law can’t do better unless it starts with life.

AO: In Roman law countries like Ecuador, legal
education focuses solely on law without liberal arts
exposure, creating lawyers who see only through legal
lenses and often serve quick political aims without
understanding broader impacts. Given your view
that law should follow life, how critical is expanding
legal education beyond pure law, especially in
contexts where, unlike the Global North, students
don’t take non-law courses?

NM: Your observation about the value of a ‘liberal
arts’ model raises interesting questions about the
relationship between the law and other disciplines. It’s
a relationship that I’ve felt strongly about for a long
time, especially since my days directing the Urban
Law Center at Fordham University in New York. The
conditions of our individual and shared lives demand
that we get comfortable with diverging ways of seeing
and understanding the world.

Again, let’s start with life, as it’s lived. The liberal arts
offer routes into and within all these rich terrains of life:
the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
I am certain –from speaking with colleagues and
students from around the world– that what we’re calling
‘liberal arts’ is in fact valued everywhere on the planet.
However, you are correct, there are deeply socialized
norms that make it hard to rethink and ‘rewire’ legal
education in many places in the world. I would argue
that these norms are less about ‘the Global South’ and
more occupational and institutional in nature. They’re
shaped by historical currents, tradition and history, as
well as legacies of colonialism. In other words, I don’t
see the Global North/South dichotomy as being the
sticking point. Any pedagogical shifts in legal education
–any shifts in ethos or approach– will come from
within the occupational and institutional structures in

1 https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/resources/pre_law/

these societies. Not from the UN, or ABA, or anywhere
else. And, even if this happens, there’s still the matter
of legal practice: the culture of the courtroom, the
firm, the government office. These can be challenging
environments for young lawyers to navigate!

I will point out, that the American Bar Association
(ABA)1 encourages future lawyers (very soundly,
I think) to study broad, interesting, and rigorous
subjects. The guidance is: Dive deeply into different
areas of human knowledge. Challenge yourself. Learn
how to conduct quality research. Also –and I see this
as vital for all of my students– write, write, and write
some more. Writing heightens one’s analytical and
reflective capacity. It rounds out learning and carves
little openings for new ideas to move. So, it is worth
putting energy into that, as an aspect of legal training.
Writing requires practice, but this practice then bears
fruit.

I’d like to share an example of how interdisciplinarity
plays out in my classrooms in Cleveland. A particularly
rewarding aspect of my job is seeing students
approach a technical concept through an ethical lens.
For instance, density is a technical concept in law and
planning. Density has to do with units of area and
the distribution and intensity of various uses. But to
reduce humans to ‘users’ of a city is problematic. We’re
not battery-operated appliances! It is a humanitarian
and civic sensibility that helps students see that a
measurable metric like density is sort of empty without
an appreciation of the ‘togetherness’ in a democratic
and ethical sense. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us
to reflect on these meanings of density.

However, there is also life to be lived outside the
classroom. There are countless ways to better
understand one’s neighborhood and city, and no
degree is required to do this. Socialized walls exist
and, if we are honest, we can see how people subscribe
to them. In doing so, they are in effect shuttering
windows onto the world. Limiting what is possible.
So, yes, a civic and humanitarian commitment and a
motivation to serve the public absolutely enrich legal
practice.