Law Professor Tiffany Atkins Receives 2022 Diversity Award, Discusses Generation Z and Advocacy
Tiffany Atkins was recognized this July as the recipient of the Association of Legal Writing Directors 2022 Diversity Award. Atkins, an associate professor at Elon University School of Law, began her career as an attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina. At Elon, she teaches courses in legal communication and writing, race and the law, and family law.
Atkins graduated from Elon University School of Law in 2011, where she also completed a post-baccalaureate certificate in non-profit management and leadership. She earned a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In 2020, Atkins’ article “#ForTheCulture: Generation Z and the Future of Legal Education” was published in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. In this interview, Atkins discusses her work as a professor of law, her research on Generation Z, inclusivity in the legal field, and more.
What did it mean to you to receive the Association of Legal Writing Directors 2022 Diversity Award?
It was amazing. They told me about it, and I became a little emotional. So much of the work I do since I was a lawyer training students to now, so much of it has been on diversity, racial equity and inclusion and belonging. I’ve done this work for years, and a lot of times, you don’t get recognition for those things – you just do it because it’s the right thing to.
It is something I feel passionately about, but to be recognized by the organization and by people, it was great. It means that they see the work that I’ve done, the ways I’ve tried to improve the academy, the ways I have tried to be a good representative and a good leader in this space. It felt wonderful to be recognized by my peers and to receive national recognition. I don’t do it for the recognition, but it felt good for someone to see it and acknowledge it. I was really touched, and I was really happy to receive that.
Atkins, pictured here with the 2022 Association of Legal Writing Directors Diversity Award, which she received in July.
How did you decide to move from your role with Legal Aid to your position as law professor?
I very much consider myself an accidental law professor. What I mean by that is that I went to law school knowing I wanted to do legal aid work. I went to Legal Aid of North Carolina, and I was 100 percent the “gladiator in the suit,” to quote “Scandal.” That was my identity. Then, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, my alma mater, contacted me and asked me to teach race law.
It had never been taught at the university before. I was thrown in feet first. I had to find a book, put together a syllabus and design a course to college sophomores and juniors about race in the American legal system. But the moment I stepped into that classroom, it was an amazing experience, even if it did cause me a bit of an identity crisis.
Was I really ready to trade the courtroom for the classroom? Then, I looked at the students and realized, I had the ability to influence who the next “gladiators” would be, and the next judges, the next advocate. I could still make a difference and a change through my students. That, for me, was sort of a transformative moment.
Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall’s mentor, and chief architect of the Brown V. Board of Education decision, once said a lawyer is either a social parasite or social engineer, and I wanted to be a social engineer. That is where I see myself now as a teacher, moving students toward being engineers, whatever their social justice movements are.
When did writing become important in your life?
Writing has always been an outlet for me. As a young girl, I was into poetry. I read “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, and became completely obsessed with writing poetry. I wanted to use my words to convey messages and to talk about social justice and change.
Writing for me has been part of my DNA in the same way as advocacy. What legal writing allows me to do is to combine my two passions, advocacy and writing, into one.
And so I talk to my students about the power of voice, how to write, how to be a passionate writer, why it matters, particularly when we’re talking about justice issues, social justice, racial equity. How you put words together, how you put sentences together, is part of the power of advocacy. Legal writing is just another part of advocacy. It’s combining my voice with a passionate topic and talking to my students about that.
What I want for my students is, when they are out of law school, I want to read their advocacy work. In my public interest and writing class, the final product is an op-ed on an issue they are passionate about in the news. One of them got published, and I have it posted on my office wall.
I want my students to go out and do the same kind of advocacy work that they see me doing. I’m a big fan of leading by example. Writing is very nerve-racking. You put your words out there, and hope that it lands, and that people feel them and appreciate them. And so that same vulnerability I’m asking them to trust me with, I’m showing that I am doing it too.
What are some of the ways that teaching legal writing has been both rewarding and challenging?
I think the rewarding part about teaching legal writing is seeing students, who come in feeling insecure about their writing or about themselves, and being able to coach and mentor them through the writing process – helping them adopt a growth mindset and seeing their transformation from “I can’t do this. It’s really hard. I’m not a good writer,” to “OK, this feels better. I can do more today than I did yesterday.” For me, that’s why I teach. It is really helping students progress in their writing, in their analysis and their skills and also in their confidence as students.
The challenge with teaching writing is that writing is just really hard. Students come to law school because they are bright students. They’ve done well in undergrad, and understandably get discouraged when we say, “This is good, but it’s really not right for the audience.” We have to help them unlearn some of the techniques they learned in college and learn to write to the legal audience. Then we have to help them regain confidence in their ability to do that work.
The other challenge with writing is that there’s so much we want to convey, so much we need to convey, and it’s hard to do that when you have limited space. You just have to hope that the words you’ve chosen on the page have the impact that you wanted them to have.
Your piece “#ForTheCulture: Generation Z and the Future of Legal Education” was published in 2020. How did you become interested in the topic of Generation Z and law school?
I started writing this paper probably in 2018. I was listening to people talk about Generation Z, and how they learn differently. How their education today was different from previous generations had been. They were the first group after No Child Left Behind. They were so focused on standardized testing. Scholars were discussing how it impacted how they learn in the educational system.
I was really curious about their diversity makeup, that they were such a diverse cohort. Approximately 48 percent identify as non-white, a significant increase from previous generations. I was curious how that would impact the educational systems and legal education.
I started the researching and writing, and then spring 2020 hit. I see everything that I’ve been thinking about – how dedicated Generation Z is to advocacy – displayed front and center. We had seen some of this prior to 2020. But then it all culminated in a massive movement after the killing of George Floyd, because so many of the speeches made and the protests that were created were by Gen Zers.
It made me wonder about my classroom and my advocacy, and how I was talking to them. I realized that I also needed to change. #ForTheCulture became a manual, of sorts: “here is my model – here’s what I’m thinking about with these students. Here’s how we can create law schools and spaces where they thrive.” If we want our law schools to still be relevant in 15-20 years, we can’t apply the 100-year-old model that we’ve been using. We really have to change it to make it relevant to these students.
What was your most significant takeaway from this project?
The biggest take away for me in my research is really how much Gen Zers are committed to using their voices to stand up because they believe in it. These causes are not just liberal causes, either. Often, we think about Gen Zers as being ultraliberal, but there’s a whole group of them who are also very conservative. But the commonality is that they believe in using their voices to advocate for things that are meaningful to them. In my classroom, in my talks with administration, and law students, I try to talk about the importance of inclusion and improving their systems.
I talk about that you need to give them advocacy opportunities at the very beginning of law school. I think you will have students who perform better, who are passionate about the work, if they can see real-world implications to the things that they’re studying.
You create and lead trainings and strategy sessions on the topic of Generation Z. What are some specific ways for law schools to create programs with this group of students in mind?
What I think they’re interested in learning how to communicate. We all have to disagree. How do we disagree? I think we should be prepared to teach them that. How do we have difficult conversations, courageous conversations, with one another?
At the classroom level, I really talk about how we can create a culture where those kinds of courageous conversations can be had, and had effectively when we as the leader in the room know how to manage the conversation so that no one feels attacked, so that no one feels excluded, so that we are working towards this common understanding.
At the institutional level, I’m talking about admissions practices: how to support your first-generation students and students of color, and how to do away with some of the old models and practices that only serve to exclude. What can we change about the curriculum to infuse more advocacy or experiential opportunities? How do we choose more of that from day one?
In the new ABA standards that have come out, courses on cultural competency and racial issues are now required. How do we begin developing those courses and developing people qualified to teach them? How do we recruit and retain students of color and underrepresented groups?
In these sessions, we walked through some of the strategies for achieving these broad outcomes that, I think, will improve the culture not just for law students but for future lawyers and for all of us.
Who are some of your favorite writers?
Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Bell Hooks – I would say that those are Black women who have influenced my writing and my ethos, my identity as a writer. How I center the experience of Black people, it is because I feel like I had the permission to do so because of Black women writers who came before me. And James Baldwin is another one of my huge influences.
How did you become interested in being a lawyer?
When I was in third grade, I wrote a letter to then-President Ronald Reagan complaining about the fact that even though I was in D.C. and could see the White House from various points in the city, my school didn’t have textbooks. There was inadequate funding for education. I wrote a letter to the president complaining about this in third grade. My mother kept the response he sent back to me.
So I think advocacy and fighting against unfairness was steeped into my DNA, but as far as wanting to be a lawyer, I was heavily influenced by – and I wrote about this – I had an op-ed in USA Today around the time Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in. I was influenced by seeing Black women as lawyers in television and knowing that I wanted to have that kind of opportunity to make a difference for others.
However, for me, it wasn’t a direct path. I had a career as in PR before law school. But eventually, I found my way back to my roots in wanting to be an advocate for others, helping people who didn’t have access to justice to get access. This led me to my practice with Legal Aid of North Carolina, where I represented indigent North Carolinians in their family law, education, public housing, and eviction cases; this really allowed me to have the kind of impact I wanted to have in the community by making sure that people knew that they had rights, and that they had access to someone who would help them to protect and enforce those rights against others.
I think my journey has always been about standing up against things that I think are wrong, even from third grade. And now, I do this in a little bit of a different way as a law professor. I just take that advocacy and channel it into my students now.
Atkins receiving the hood during the commencement ceremony at Elon University School of Law in 2011.
In what ways have you been involved as an NCBA member?
I completed the Leadership Academy in 2018. It contributed so much to my idea of leadership. In grad school, I received the David Gergen Award for Leadership and Professionalism, and I studied non-profit and leadership. I have looked back over the notes from the Leadership Academy quite a bit. You do many personality assessments of your leadership style, and what your weaknesses are as a leader. I found myself looking back over those notes earlier this year preparing for class because I think each person needs to do a little bit of self-inventory, and I wanted to come back into the classroom this semester aware of my weak spots – where are these things where I need to shore up about how I teach, how I communicate, and so the leadership Academy was amazing and the connections that I made there.
The NCBA is a wonderful organization. There are opportunities to talk to young lawyers and to try to teach young lawyers to be leaders.
I’d love to see, the Bar Association talk, maybe more intentionally, about other ways people can use their degree, like becoming a law professor. A lot of people don’t think about becoming a law professor. They don’t see themselves in the classroom. I would love to see more people – particularly people from historically excluded backgrounds – join my profession and teach our next generation of students, because those students are going to be the future lawyers and judges in the state.
What are some ways that the legal field can work toward greater inclusivity?
There are many different things that go into diversifying the legal profession.
There are so many obstacles you have to go through. You have to take the LSAT, which if you don’t have money – I’m thinking about myself as a first-generation student who didn’t come from money – if you don’t have money, to afford the prep courses that teach you how to beat the test, it can be a barrier. A lot of law schools rely on the LSAT score, but if you don’t do well on it (or on tests in general), you might not have a great score, and may be limited in the schools you can attend. That first barrier could limit a lot of students of color.
Then, once you get into law school, if you’re in an overwhelmingly white environment, you may suffer from impostor syndrome or stereotype threat. You may not perform as well because you’re constantly wondering whether you belong, questioning your intelligence, wondering whether you made the right choice or whether you should be there. If you’re experiencing racism and microaggressions, that also could impact your performance.
So I think this is where law schools have to do hard work of figuring out how to create inclusive cultures where students of color and first-gen students thrive, and they’re not having to battle these imposter thoughts that can impact their performance.
Once you’ve made it through the crucible of the law school, then you have to take the bar exam, which is also another test of privilege. To prepare for the bar exam, you have to study for two months, a period of time when you can’t work, because preparing to take the exam is like having a full-time job. My study day began at seven in the morning, and didn’t end until 11 p.m. Who can afford not to work for two months to study for a test? And, if you don’t pass the bar, you can’t practice law, so there could be at least another six months before you can work as a lawyer and earn money. There are many different places along the way that become hurdles for people of color and these hurdles lead to a profession where only five percent of lawyers are Black, and two percent are Latino.
If what we want at the end is more lawyers of color, then we need to reverse engineer. How do we get them here with the LSAT? What do we change with the curriculum of law school? What do we change about the bar exam? That might allow us to retain more students and add them to our profession instead of filtering them out because of things like privilege, or things they don’t have access to.
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.