Amid growing national polarization and a slew of intense court battles, a Stanford legal scholar is bringing journalists to campus to teach law students how to become better storytellers.
Michelle Wilde Anderson, a law professor with expertise in poverty, housing and environmental justice, hopes she can generate momentum for policy change by publicizing the human impact of policies and legal decisions.
Anderson first proposed a reading group last May. But then, her students Ben Wofford J.D. ’24 and Molly Shapiro J.D. ’25 suggested bringing journalists to campus.
In October, Anderson co-founded the Legal Journalism Initiative (LJI) with Wofford and Shapiro. The three united over the importance for future lawyers to study writing and center human stories at the heart of legal issues.
At least six journalists have since come to campus for private seminars, including ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll and Politico editors Michael Schaffer and Elizabeth Ralph. The guest reporters discuss their long-form stories with students for two hours and, afterward, the crowd mingles over a Treehouse dinner.
Anderson said current political polarization and unprecedented legal changes made it imperative for more law students to learn the craft of storytelling and act as “teachers to the general public.”
“The stakes of a human, public understanding of legal change are really high right now,” Anderson said. “Knowledge of government and civics in the country is very weak.”
On Jan. 18, LJI hosted its first public discussion, a conversation with New York Times Magazine writer Emily Bazelon.
Central to Bazelon’s talk was the mission of journalists in the current polarized political climate. Bazelon emphasized the importance of journalistic independence and telling human stories.
“Being independent means being open-minded and following the facts or reporting whatever they may be,” Bazelon said, citing New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger.
In a private seminar to LJI students prior to the speaker event, Bazelon discussed two of her stories. They take a human-centric approach in exploring the legality of abortion pills and constitutional protections of defendants in courts.
Anjali Kumar ’15 J.D. ’25 MIP ’25 said she was struck by Bazelon’s “humanity,” such as how the journalist maintained a relationship with two sources she had interviewed almost 10 years prior.
“As law students, we study interesting materials that are grounded in human stories,” Kumar said. “But we often are not really focusing on the humanity of the underlying defendants.”
LJI was created as a forum for journalists to study how to “explain a sprawling legal phenomenon through characters, scene and place-based storytelling,” Wofford said. He cited Anderson’s 2022 book “The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America” as an inspiration for the initiative.
In the book, Anderson incorporated storytelling in her own research on the plight of four industrial cities under collapsing local government budgets and intergenerational poverty. She immersed herself in the communities and centered local workers.
“There is an absence of political will to show up for places struggling and believe that progress is possible,” Anderson said. “In order to restore this political will, we have to start telling stories of resilience, perseverance and innovation.”
One of the four cities Anderson visited was Stockton, Calif. She said she felt that Stanford and Silicon Valley “owe something” to nearby cities like Stockton, which are home to much of Stanford’s workforce. Many workers from these cities leave their homes at 3:30 a.m. and commute more than 90 minutes to Stanford, she said.
“It was a privilege to be in that space — in people’s homes and living rooms — and to try to center the voices and work of people there,” Anderson said.
LJI’s current cohort is composed of students who demonstrate an interest in “wedding their law degree with public writing,” according to Wofford.
Some participants have worked in newspapers like The New York Times and The Harvard Crimson, whereas others — like Kumar — want to probe how to “use legal knowledge in a different way.”
The initiative drew many that wanted to understand and write the human stories behind laws.
Shafeen Pittal J.D. ’24, for one, was frustrated when she studied Ashcroft v. Iqbal, a Supreme Court case in which Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani American, sued the government for detaining and mistreating him in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Iqbal was one of numerous Muslim men arrested by the FBI following the terrorist attack.
Pittal said her professor discussed the decision’s effect of stiffening the standard to plead in federal courts for future civil action lawsuits, but did not discuss Iqbal’s story, nor anti-Muslim sentiments during the War on Terror.
Later, Pittal said, she read a Stanford Law Review article written by law professor Shirin Sinnar. In “The Lost Story of Iqbal,” Sinnar questions the Court’s decision and “reconstructs facts of Iqbal’s immigrant life” and detention through interviews.
Pittal recounted experiencing the power of legal storytelling “in a moment of desperation as a Muslim American.”
“You cannot discuss these legal rulings in an isolated manner,” Pittal said. “You have to talk about the stories.”
Moving forward, Wofford said he hopes the connections law students build with guest journalists in LJI seminars would help them eventually pitch stories to major news publications.
“It’s a marriage of interest: Students get to learn journalism, and cash-strapped newsrooms get free labor,” Wofford joked. “There is a need for law students to write about legal doctrinal issues in newsrooms. Law students really do have something to give.”
Legal Journalism Initiative’s next public event, a talk by ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis on post-pandemic schooling, will take place on Thursday.