Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Welcome! I'm so glad you're considering PL 250. This is an online (scheduled meetings) course . Attendance at class sessions is expected.

Plan on roughly 8 to 10 hours per week for the coursework, including your live class time. There is no final exam. Your grade is built across attendance and participation, eight journal entries,  two longer writing assignments, and four discussion posts of your choice from the prompts offered throughout the term.

What this course is. Cultural responsiveness is a professional obligation for legal professionals, not an optional skill or a matter of personal politics. The Oregon Rules of Professional Conduct and the ABA Model Rules Preamble both make clear that legal professionals have duties to clients, to the legal system, and to the public, and those duties cannot be discharged competently without an honest understanding of how culture, race, language, and trauma shape every legal interaction. PL 250 is the course where you build that understanding.

We work with the Five Habits of Cross-Cultural Lawyering as our primary analytical framework, with Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down as an extended case study, and with Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy as a structured journaling practice. We also draw on Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, Trauma Informed Oregon's framework for trauma-informed practice, and primary materials from the Oregon State Bar.

This course will ask you to look at yourself, including your own assumptions, your own cultural lens, and your own blind spots, alongside the legal institutions you are preparing to work within. That work takes honesty and patience, and it can be uncomfortable. It is also some of the most important work a legal professional does.

Required texts. You will need three books for this course: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Layla Saad, Me and White Supremacy; and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. All three are widely available through the PCC Bookstore, public libraries, and used-book sellers. Used copies are fine. If you are unable to purchase these materials, please let me know! All other readings, including the Five Habits materials and the Trauma Informed Oregon resources, are provided through D2L at no cost.

A note on AI. This course has a very clear and strict academic integrity policy on AI usage. Please read the syllabus.

About your instructor. I'm Megan Dorton, a licensed Oregon attorney and faculty member in PCC's Paralegal Program. I practice in family, housing, and administrative law, and I came to PCC to help train future legal professionals to increase access to justice. I love this course and I look forward to working with you. You can reach me anytime at megan.dorton@pcc.edu.