01/03/2022

Teaching incarcerated youth, UChicago law students find new perspectives on legal system

Law school

During the third week of a virtual seminar, Prof. Emily Buss and 10 University of Chicago Law School students were teaching incarcerated teenagers about their constitutional rights, and the topic was divisive: the right to own and carry a gun. 

Each of the seminar’s 10 weeks would cover a different topic—including freedom of speech, reproductive rights, and cruel and unusual punishment—and each session would expand the views of both the Law School and high school students. 

But, for the soon-to-be-lawyers, Buss said, none was quite as eye-opening as the debate on gun rights.

“This is a group of law students who are big believers in gun control,” said Buss, the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law and an expert on children’s and parents’ rights and the relationship between parent, child and state. “But they’re talking to kids who have grown up in very violent communities, so the youth felt strongly that everybody should have the right to carry a gun. The youth believe that having a gun is necessary for personal protection—that they are in great danger if they don't have one.”

In previous years, Buss had led Law School students in teaching teenagers from the University of Chicago Laboratory High School and Woodlawn Charter School. During those classes, they discussed and debated issues related to the rights of minors, including free speech in public schools, school searches and drug tests, disciplinary procedures and racial diversity in school placement. 

In the spring of 2021, for the first time, Buss created a new version of the class geared toward youth who were incarcerated.

Read the full story here. 

This story was first published by UChicago News. 

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