Renee Nicole Allen
Associate Professor of Legal Writing Faculty Director,
Center for Race and Law St. John’s University School of Law
Sha-Shana N.L Crichton
Assistant Professor of Lawyering Skills Director,
Legal Writing Center Howard University School of Law
The Board of Directors of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) is pleased to announce two recipients of the 2024 ALWD Diversity Award: Renee Nicole Allen and Sha-Shana N.L. Crichton. Both advocates of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Prof. Allen is an Associate Professor of Legal Writing and Faculty Director of the Center for Race & the Law at St. John’s University School of Law, and Prof. Crichton is an Assistant Professor of Lawyering Skills and Director of the Legal Writing Center at Howard University School of Law.
The Diversity Award honors individuals who have made significant accomplishments in the area of DEI or has demonstrated a strong commitment to promoting DEI, including efforts to improve the status of historically underrepresented groups. ALWD created this award in furtherance of its continued commitment to contributing to a legal writing discipline that is equitable and inclusive. The meaningful inclusion of diverse voices and experiences is necessary for ALWD to succeed in its mission of improving legal education and the analytic, reasoning, and writing abilities of lawyers. The heartfelt nominations of their colleagues detail why both Prof. Allen and Sha-Shana deserve this award.
Professor Renee Allen
Prof. Allen’s compelling nomination notes that her teaching, scholarship, and service all coalesce around DEI. While teaching several legal writing courses, Prof. Allen has developed and teaches two advanced courses: Race and the Law; and The Movement: Race, Rhythm, and Social Justice. Further, she is the founding director of St. John’s Center for Race and Law. Under Prof. Allen’s pioneering leadership, the Center has organized in just two years two major scholarly events: the Center’s inaugural symposium, “Racialized Notions of Professionalism and the Law,” and a two-day “Rest as Resistance” retreat that explored the book of the same name.
Prof. Allen’s scholarship, which focuses on race, social justice, and legal education, is equally impressive. Her articles, “Get out: Structural Racism and Academic Terror”[1] and “From Academic Freedom to Cancel Culture: Silencing Black Women in the Legal Academy”[2] call for a shift from outdated, yet deeply embedded, academic norms to ones that create positive experiences for Black women and individuals from historically excluded communities. Her most recent article, “Legal Academia’s White Gaze,”[3] calls out the persistent centering of Whiteness in legal scholarship, including (and especially) when it is about race and antiracism. Prof. Allen’s nominations noted that her scholarship pointedly asks the tough questions of institutions that portend to be making strides in DEI.
Prof. Allen is in demand as an invited speaker at numerous law schools and national conferences, where she has shared her compelling scholarship. She is also the creator and host of the “Law Professors are People, Too” podcast, which offers law professors the opportunity to discuss the intersections of their personal identities and professional roles. Prior to joining St. John’s faculty, Prof. Allen held positions in academic success and bar prep at several law schools. She is a member of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) and Writing as Resistance (W.A.R.), a legal writing professors of color collective that supports diverse legal writing faculty in the academy.
Professor Sha-Shana N.L. Crichton
Several of Prof. Crichton’s colleagues in the legal writing academy wrote separately to nominate her for the award. Despite their writing separate nominations, each nomination highlighted a common theme: Prof. Crichton’s passion for DEI and the empathy that she shows her colleagues and students who need her assistance.
All of Prof. Crichton’s nominators cite her unique position as professor of legal writing and former director of legal writing at Howard Law, one of only six historically black (HBCU) law schools. At Howard Law, Prof. Crichton pours into her students and prepares them to meet the challenges of the legal profession that does not look like many of them. Despite wide-ranging administrative duties and the type of uncompensated extra work loads professors who engage with DEI face, all of Prof. Crichton’s nominators note her untiring willingness to share her knowledge and insights with her colleagues and students. Her nominators left no doubt that Prof. Crichton is a “very special person” who “has brought her experiences from teaching to a diverse population at Howard Law to her work for our legal writing community and the broader legal academy.”
Notably, Prof. Crichton’s scholarship highlights issues of diversity in legal teaching, including “Teaching in the Time of Disruption: A Case for Empathy and Honoring Diversity,”[4] “Incorporating Race into the First-Year Legal Writing Course,”[5] and “Incorporating Social Justice into the 1L Legal Writing Course: A Tool for Empowering Students of Color and of a Historically Marginalized Group and Improving Learning.”[6] She has presented this scholarship at regional and national conferences, and was recognized as one of ALWD’s Distinguished Speakers in 2021. As noted by one of her nominators, Prof. Crichton often takes time to explain to interested colleagues some “best practices” for incorporating DEI and social justice issues into their teaching. More specifically, all nominators highlighted Prof. Crichton’s work with LL.M. students and other non-native English-speaking students at Howard Law, and Prof. Crichton’s assistance with one of her non-native English-speaking students at George Washington Law.
Unsurprisingly, Prof. Crichton is equally engaged with service. She has been active with LWI and ALWD for many years, which includes serving on the ALWD Board and numerous ALWD and LWI committees. Specific to diversity, Prof. Crichton served as both the chair and co-chair of the LWI Diversity and Inclusion Committee (Co-Chair 2018 -2020; Chair 2016-18), during which she focused on challenges in hiring and retaining legal writing faculty of color. Moreover, she is also a member of W.A.R., which supports existing legal writing faculty of color by seeking ways to make them more visible and finding ways to encourage and support them in producing scholarship. Finally, Prof. Crichton also promotes diversity initiatives in the larger practice community. She is currently a Board Member for Giles S. Rich Inn of Courts and is currently a co-chair of its Diversity, Alliance, and Outreach Committee.
For these reasons, the Board is proud to announce Professor Renee Nicole Allen and Professor Sha-Shana N.L. Crichton as the recipients of the 2024 ALWD Diversity Award.
The ALWD Board is grateful for the work of the Diversity Committee in identifying nominees and making recommendations to the Board. The Committee includes Co-chairs Brenda Gibson and Em Wright, and members Ashley Armstrong, Carol Mallory, Alice Silkey, Rachel Smith, and Kathy Vinson.
Please note that the 2024 Diversity Award will be presented to Professor Allen and Professor Crichton at the 2025 ALWD Biennial Conference next summer. We also look forward to recognizing their contributions during a Diversity Committee program this upcoming academic year. Stay tuned for details on this event.
[1] 29 WM. & MARY J. RACE, GENDER & SOC. JUST. 599 (2023).
[2] 68 UCLA L. Rev. 364 (2021).
[3] 109 MINN. L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2024).
[4] 25 Legal Writing: J. Legal Writing Inst. 4 (2021).
[5] The Oxford Handbook of Race and Lw in the United States (Devon Carbado, Khiara Bridges, & Emily M.S. Houh eds. Oxford University Press 2021).
[6]24 Mich. J. Race & Law 251 (2019).