The letter below is an actual letter sent by a group of law school students to one of their professors after he wore a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt to his Criminal Procedure class, in which the subject was “violence against the black community by police.” In the eight-paragraph letter, the students make several assumptions about who their professor is, what he stands for, and what “studying the law” means as they criticize their professor. He then wrote back identifying some of their assumptions and explained how their assumptions were assumptions, and not necessarily factual.

Step 1: Identify the students’ assumptions (there are many, but we’ll just look at a few)

Step 2: Identify their actual claim (their conclusion about why the professor did what he did)

Step 3: Determine, based on their assumptions, what arguments they were not seeing because their assumptions blocked their minds from thinking about it any other way. This is likely how the professor challenged them (counterargued).

1. Paragraph 2: Students are offended he wore the T-shirt to school because they assume the purpose of law school is to______ and the professors who teach there are supposed to _____________.

2. Paragraph 3: They assume that because he wore the T-shirt, he believes that____________, and therefore other students believe ___________ about him.

3. Paragraphs 4-5: The students assume that anyone who wears the slogan “Black Lives Matter” believes _____________ about the way they see or treat law enforcement.

4. Paragraph 5: The students feel the professor has isolated himself from other students because his wearing of the T-shirt seemed to demonstrate a lack of ________.

5. Paragraph 6: To the students, the only way to “learn and respect the law” is to_______. They assume that personal opinions and the law ________.

6. Paragraph 7: The students assume the low pass rate for the Bar Exam is because professors _____.

Step 4: Here are three belief statements from the students, based on their assumptions. Write at least two ways you can challenge their thinking. You may make a statement or ask it in the form of a question.

1. There is something called “the law” that is objective, fixed, and separate from the society over which it governs.

2. There is an invisible “only” in front of the words “Black Lives Matter.” Therefore, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is racist*.

3. The history of how Black Lives Matter came to be does not matter; what matters is the movement itself.

*Racism being defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities (abilities) and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”