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The COVID-19 viral pandemic exposed equity and safety culture gaps in American legal education. Legal education forms part of America’s Critical Infrastructure whose continuity is important to the economy, public safety, democracy, and the national security of the United States. To address the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for future viral pandemics and safety risks, this article recommends law schools develop a safety culture to foster health, safety, robust educational dialogue, and equity. To guide safety-and-equity-centered decision-making and promote effective legal education during and following the COVID-19 pandemic, this article contends legal education must put health, safety, and equity first. It proposes an ethical framework for legal education that centers diversity and inclusion as the foundation of robust educational dialogue. This article’s interdisciplinary analysis of COVID-19 scientific studies recommends law schools follow the science and exercise extreme caution before convening classes in person or in a hybrid fashion. COVID-19 infection risks serious illness, long-lasting complications, and death. It has preyed on America’s inequities. African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinx Americans, older Americans, and those with certain underlying health conditions including pregnant women face higher levels of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 infection. COVID-19’s inequitable risks may separate those participating in class in person, or online, by race, ethnicity, tribe, age, and health. Law schools must ensure that during the COVID-19 health emergency, hybrid or in-person pedagogical models do not undermine diversity and inclusion that supports educational dialogue and First Amendment values. The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the imperative of putting health, safety, and equity first in legal education.

Legal scholars have expressed varying views about the roles of liberty and equality in the area of lesbian and gay rights. Some have encouraged gay rights litigators to stress one form of argument over the other. At least one commentator, Pamela Karlan, has suggested that looking at the issue through the lenses of both the due process clause and the equal protection clause simultaneously can have synergistic effects, producing results that neither clause might reach by itself. This article examines selected marriage cases brought by same-sex couples in state courts in order to understand the role played by liberty and equality in this one segment of gay rights litigation. It is the thesis of this Article (written with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) that, by focusing on the two constitutional issues simultaneously, gay rights litigators in the state court marriage cases have sparked a synergistic evolution of both liberty and equality under state constitutional law.

Judith Jarvis Thomson is a teacher of philosophy and we are law school teachers. As teachers in different but related disciplines, we share a common pedagogical approach: use of the case method. In law, our cases are stories of real-life struggles with real-life resolutions. But in the law school classroom, the creative teacher will often push beyond the real life story. In Socratic fashion, the law school teacher will pose a series of hypotheticals to test the students' understanding of the case. Often the law school teacher prepares for class by searching for the perfectly framed hypothetical. Judith Jarvis Thomson is the quintessential expert at creating the perfectly framed hypothetical. Her most well-known hypothetical is "The Famous Violinist." It is intended to pose the problem of abortion in a different light. She asks you to imagine this: You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? [pp. 2-3] A Defense of Abortion, the first essay in Rights, Restitution, & Risk