The pandemic pivot

When the University of Richmond announced a return to in-person learning for the fall 2020 semester, one thing was certain: It would be a semester like no other.

From building safety to health protocols, no aspect of life would go unaltered during the first full semester in this worldwide pandemic. At the law school, that meant updated HVAC systems, new traffic patterns in the building, and required COVID-19 testing. Along the way, the University of Richmond’s oft-repeated trifecta of a slogan became the foundation for all interactions on campus: “Six feet. Mask up. Protect Our Web.”

As students, faculty, and staff alike made changes to accommodate this new reality, they also looked for new ways to come together as a community. Whether that meant technological updates so classmates could hear one another through face coverings, pedagogical changes to better connect students with their professors, or finding virtual outlets for social life, adaptation was key to success.

Here, we look at just a few examples of how students, faculty, and staff helped the law school community pivot — thanks in no small part to a combination of resilience, spirit, and good humor along the way.

Laying the Groundwork

The university announced over the summer that students could attend classes in person for the fall semester — while allowing flexibility for those students who opted to learn from home. The core challenge of that proposition was figuring out how to deliver an identically engaging experience to remote and in-person learners at the same time. The solution was what came to be known as the “hybrid classroom.” Working with the university’s information services team, the law school’s technical services team got to work.

The goal for each classroom, explained Carl Hamm, multimedia production and technology specialist, was to keep technology simple and uniform so that any faculty member could enter any classroom and know how to use the equipment. The initial basic setup included a camera with a built-in microphone and a speaker on a tripod. But that was just the first iteration.

One of the first challenges, said Hamm, was to create a system in which all participants could engage with one another. “In the hybrid world, professors really wanted to be able to see the virtual students as well as their in-class students,” he said. So in July, the team brought in truckloads of televisions to outfit each classroom across campus to allow all of the remote students’ faces to be displayed on one large screen.

After creating a solution for video communication, the team had to tackle an even bigger obstacle: audio. With some students spread around a room, some students connecting remotely, and everyone masked, creating an environment in which all participants could be heard proved to be a tall order. The team conducted tests in every classroom — with Dean Wendy Perdue occasionally standing in as a student to check the audio quality. After realizing that the standard room microphones weren’t going to pass muster in all spaces, they started adding layer upon layer of extra amplification, including one personal microphone headset for each of the masked professors, as well as “boundary mics” throughout the larger classrooms to pick up the voices of the distanced students.

In order to properly convert a ballroom-sized space in the Jepson Alumni Center into a classroom for law students, the team added a 32-channel sound mixer plus the same number of individual wired boundary mics, taped throughout the vast space. All told, the team installed — and tested — 85 mics in nine classrooms.

“I listened in on so many classes I joked that I could probably take the February bar exam,” said Kim Edwards, director of the technology services team. That team — which includes Mason Ramsey, technology services specialist, and Paul Birch, computer services librarian — spent more than one weekend working into the wee hours to outfit the spaces.

“There were challenges — so many little things that can go wrong with these setups,” said Hamm.
An intensive series of faculty training sessions, plus a dedicated student technology assistant in every room, helped overcome on-site hiccups.

“Another major victory, and another thing I’m really grateful for, are the teaching assistants that we hired,” said Hamm. “We couldn’t be everywhere at once, so we had to rely on the TAs.” Edwards agreed. “The TAs have been a godsend,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been able to pull this off without the student assistants.”

Students were one part of the team effort. Cross-campus partners were another, with experts from the Modlin Center for the Arts providing acoustic guidance, members of the facilities team supporting custom acoustical modifications, and staff from information services helping with installation across campus. The end results yielded some positive takeaways.

“The future of how we teach will forever be changed where technology is concerned,” said Edwards. Plus, “faculty have become really proficient in how to use the tools more effectively.” And that’s a good thing.

Finding a Place

For the 153 new law students starting school in August 2020, the standard 1L nerves reached a new level of anxiety when it came to the pandemic. So, for example, instead of fearing cold calls, students had to fear cold calls in masks.

“I was expecting it to be a lot scarier to be in person,” Ryan Dunn, L’23, admitted. But the reality proved to be less intimidating. “I spend most of my day in the law school,” he said, “and I never worried about my safety. The law school has taken a lot of precautions, [and] my classmates and peers are committed to that same level of safety.”

In fact, the social distancing provided a silver lining. Instead of being divided into the usual three sections, this year’s 1Ls were divided into six groups to promote better social distancing. The smaller sections meant even smaller classes.

“I really appreciated the smaller classes,” Dunn said, which helped “build better relationships with my classmates and my professors.” Lindsey Boryan, L’23, agreed. “If anything, I think we’ve benefited from having smaller section sizes” and the additional attention from professors, she said.

The approach the professors take in the classroom is important, too. “The professors all kind of started being open and honest — ‘Hey, this is weird. We’re going to get through it, and we’re going to try to make it as normal as possible,’” said Boryan.

“They’re wanting to get to know us on a more personal level,” added Dunn — whether that took the form of a casual Zoom chat or a virtual “front porch” meetup with other students from Professor Noah Sachs’ torts class.
Part of the experience is a certain level of adaptability. For example, “you very quickly become used to having a conversation with somebody with a mask on,” said Boryan.

“We had to play the cards we’d been dealt and try to make the best of it,” said Dunn. So that meant small group outings to the sculpture gardens at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to meet students from other sections or a weekly virtual trivia game organized by the Student Bar Association.

Throughout the experience, though, one thing Dunn emphasized is “how proud I am of the university and the law school for the steps they take to keep me safe and to keep my classmates safe to ensure that we have as normal a semester as possible.”

Virtual Skills-Building

For many students, one of the key benefits of the legal education experience is to combine theory with practice in real-world externships or pro bono work. Those opportunities give students the ability to build skills in an on-site environment while making connections in the legal community. That end goal became a tall order under the confines of COVID-19.

Students in Professor Tara Casey’s public policy course were still able to gain some hands-on experience in a particularly timely and topical field. Partnering with the Virginia Poverty Law Center, groups of students took a deep dive into issues of housing equity. In teams of two, students created policy memos on topics ranging from foreclosure to property tax. “With this year’s intersection of housing and the economic fallout from COVID, some of these issues are particularly acute for a number of the community,” Casey said.

Students also gained hands-on exerpience through the externship program, directed by Professor Ali Silva Fannon. “There’s lots of uncertainty for everyone in the legal profession,” said Silva Fannon. With 21 students working in a variety of civil, criminal, in-house counsel, and judicial placements, no two experiences were alike. Some students worked remotely, performing legal research from home and connecting with colleagues via virtual meetings. Other students in judicial placements were able to work in person in some court systems.

“The field instructors had to go above and beyond to make it as normal as possible,” Silva Fannon said.
Students came away with some quality legal experience — not to mention “an insider view of how the entire legal profession is trying to grapple with a new challenge,” Silva Fannon said.

COVID Meets Academics

All faculty members adapted their course formats due to the pandemic. But some also adapted their course content, leveraging the myriad legal issues surrounding COVID-19 to the benefit of their students. In the spring semester, for example, students in Professor Joel Eisen’s administrative law course analyzed federal agencies’ responses to the pandemic.

“For the students, it’s important to think about and talk about COVID as something that is influencing everything they do,” said Professor Chiara Giorgetti, who developed and launched a new course — COVID-19, Global Emergencies, and International Law.

“The initial framework we started with was: What is international health law, what does it allow states to do, what is the framework, and how is this being applied in times of COVID?” said Giorgetti. Students took on the questions in different project assignments. One student examined the obligations of different states to collaborate in the development and distribution of a vaccine, while another looked at the impact of COVID-19 on pending cases in the International Court of Justice.

The goals of the course were to explore not just the reach of international law, but also the limitations of international law in times of global crisis, Giorgetti said. “International law certainly plays a role in addressing the health emergency, but it’s not the solution for everything.”

Giorgetti worked quickly to pull together a course for which the subject matter was happening in real time. She sourced material from blog posts, podcasts, and online articles from outlets like the European Journal of International Law. And as the semester — and the pandemic — progressed, she saw students become more and more engaged with the material.

“It is a difficult and very new topic,” Giorgetti acknowledged, and “the students have very interesting questions.” There are, she noted, “kinds of classes that work well on Zoom, and I think this is a good example.”

Building Community in the Classroom

Professor Corinna Lain started the semester with a creative task for students in her evidence and criminal procedure courses: Pick a fight song.

“I told them, if they were the star of a movie and the lead gets knocked down and there’s a time in the movie when they decide they’re going to push through it and conquer their challenges, what’s going to be their song?”
Lain compiled the song submissions into a playlist for each class, which she would then queue up 15 minutes before the start of every class. “This is a way we can get to know each other,” she explained. But the songs played a role greater than icebreaker.

“There may come a time when you need your fight songs,” Lain told her students. And with these playlists — with artists ranging from Simon and Garfunkel to DJ Khaled to Elton John — students would be equipped with “some kick-butt, overcome-your-challenges songs.”

Lain’s goal was to provide some encouragement during a year full of uncertainty. “Music is my own ministry,” she explained. “It ministers to my soul, it changes my moods, it does all kinds of things for me. Maybe it will do the same for [students], too.”

Students, after all, were at the heart of every strategy to adapt law school life during a pandemic. As Lain said, “For me, this will be a special class in my heart, not only because of their grit and determination, but also because of their character and their community and their caring.”