This class uses museums to show law students the high art of curating ideas

Patrick Barry, University of Michigan

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of course:

Art and Advocacy

What prompted the idea for the course?

I like taking lawyers and law students to art museums. At first, I built these outings into the courses I teach on persuasion, creativity and artificial intelligence. But the response was so positive – and the conversation so rich and interesting – that Art and Advocacy became its own class.

What does the course explore?

Students examine the intellectual, emotional and professional overlap between the craft of presenting art and the craft of presenting arguments. Both activities involve storytelling. Both involve putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. And both depend on properly balancing evidence and emotion, comprehensiveness and concision, provocation and restraint.

Why is this course relevant now?

Advocacy – whether in the courtroom, the boardroom or in private discussions and debates – is in many ways an act of curation. It calls for highlighting themes and making connections. It requires informed selection. It places a huge premium on context, contrast and having a bold, transformative vision.

Most of all, though, advocacy, like art, involves the capacity to simultaneously connect with different audiences and push them to look at legal issues, people and ideologies in new ways. We can all learn a lot about how to develop and deploy that ability by spending time with the art collected – and strategically arranged – in museums.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

The best advocates serve as helpful guides. They don’t force their perspective on people. They don’t bludgeon us with dogma or overwhelm us with irrelevant details. They instead focus, like skillful museum curators, on directing our attention in ways that ultimately empower us to make more informed, evidence-based judgments and decisions.

Illumination, not coercion, is the goal.

What materials does the course feature?

Part of the fun of this course is the perpetually dynamic syllabus, because the museums we visit continually update collections and offer new exhibits.

We’ve seen the Van Gogh in America exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts. We’ve seen pieces by Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. We’ve even managed to include works by Monet, Rothko and Picasso.

What will the course prepare students to do?

Become better visual advocates. Litigators need to be good visual advocates, especially when presenting evidence. Dealmakers need to be good visual advocates, especially when pitching projects. So does anyone who delivers presentations in person, online or through a hybrid arrangement.

If you only ever operate in sentences and paragraphs, you miss out on opportunities to communicate your message – and connect with people – in other creative, memorable ways.

Patrick Barry, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law and Director of Digital Academic Initiatives, University of Michigan

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