Decolonizing Legal Mentoring
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 18 |
DEPARTMENT MENTORING MATTERS
BY J. RYANN PEYTON
What is legal mentoring? Experts often describe it as a less experienced lawyer tapping into the knowledge, skills, and experience of a senior or high performing lawyer to help the newer lawyer (1) acclimate to the legal environment, (2) cultivate professional and social networks, (3) acquire professional knowledge and skills, and (4) prepare for entry into the professional workforce. But this traditional model and its stated objectives, while well intentioned, limit our thinking and the scope of our activities.
Mentoring occurs not just between two people, but in community through a complex web of relationships with others. It is reciprocal and interactive, not a one-way street. Mentoring occurs not in big moments of epiphany, but in the hundreds of little interactions we have daily with others. The traditional definition of mentoring, which is largely shaped by Western colonialism, restricts the "who, what, when, where, why, and how" of mentoring. It is too narrow to meet the needs of a modern legal profession. Yet this colonial definition continues to dominate and inform the mentoring of lawyers in the United States.
This article addresses the hidden assumptions of mentoring that spring from the history of colonization and perpetuate the meritocratic hierarchy of the profession. It examines some of the most harmful instructional models used in traditional legal mentoring and how they can be "decolonized" to provide more equitable and just mentoring opportunities for racial/ethnic minority lawyers.
The Colonial Influence
Colonialism is the maintenance of political, social, economic, and cultural domination over people by a foreign power for an extended period.[1] In other words, it's a way for one group to control another. The colonial history of the United States dates back to the early 1600s, when European settlers arrived on the North American continent with a presumption of sovereign entitlement and a belief in their right to establish a state over which they could exercise permanent and exclusive control.[2] Today, the three foundational processes upon which our country was built—Indigenous elimination, anti-Black racism, and immigrant exploitation—continue to shape inequities within many of our modern systems and structures.[3]
One of the most colonially influenced systems in America is the legal system.[4] The effects go well beyond the scope of this article, but, as relevant here, include an ongoing struggle to recruit and retain racial/ethnic minority lawyers and create diversity, equity, and inclusion in the profession. Recently, cross-racial mentoring has gained attention as a principal and necessary action to address this problem. Yet little attention has been paid to how traditional legal mentoring incorporates colonial notions of power, assimilation, and erasure. For example:
■ Socially marginalized or under represented lawyers are assumed to lack competency, skill, resources, and influence. They are less likely to be "chosen" as mentees in the first place, and, if chosen, are not asked to contribute to the mentoring relationship because their "outsider" perspective is questioned or undervalued by the "expert" mentor.
■ Mentors "teach the ropes" of the profession based on Eurocentric norms and values.
■ Mentoring pairs fail to examine the institutional, professional, and societal norms influencing the outcome of the mentoring process.[5]
These elements of traditional mentoring do little to support the inclusion of racial/ethnic minority lawyers and instead strip diversity from our profession.[6]
Decolonizing Harmful Mentoring Models
Unfortunately, traditional legal mentoring often does more harm than good for the lawyers such mentoring aims to serve. To improve mentoring outcomes for these lawyers, we need to "decolonize" those instructional models that contain hierarchical, Eurocentric principles, and replace them with collaborative, holistic instructional models.
The Deficit Model
The deficit model assumes a hierarchy within the mentoring relationship where the mentor is deemed to have power over the mentee by virtue of their age, expertise, or position in the...
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