What’s Art Doing in a Law Course? Making Better Lawyers

After a lifetime in music, Fumika Mizuno ’26 put down her violin when she got to Yale Law School.

Mizuno started learning the instrument at age 4, eventually playing with chamber ensembles, youth and college orchestras, and even a Chicago jazz band. She took a break from violin when she became a law student, but a course last spring had her playing again.

“Arts and the Lawyer,” a new course taught by Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law Paul Gewirtz ’70, not only required students to think and write about the arts, but also created opportunities to practice them. Its central premise was that the arts can both enrich your life and help make you a better lawyer. 

“Arts can enhance a person’s empathy and understanding of human life — capacities typically needed by the best lawyers,” Gewirtz said. “And artworks can challenge, incite, or inspire people in diverse ways, even affecting legal career choices. Beyond that, for many law students and lawyers, their finite life is more fulfilling if it includes the arts and the beauties of art.”

Gewirtz, whose scholarship and teaching currently focus on constitutional law and U.S.-China relations, is the founder and director of the Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. He also considers art an important part of his life. This is not Gewirtz’s first time incorporating the arts into his teaching. In the ’90s, he taught a course on law and literature with Peter Brooks, then chair of Yale’s comparative literature department. The new course is different because students engage with the arts more directly, he said.

The latest course had two parts. For the first part, students discussed art of different genres during regular class meetings. The second part was a required individual project. Students could write a course-related paper or they could pursue an artistic project of their choice. For Mizuno, that was a recital. Students also wrote short fiction, produced paintings, and authored a chapbook of poetry, among other works of art.

In class, students explored both art explicitly related to law and politics as well as examples that Gewirtz selected to illustrate his premises about the arts’ value to lawyers. In one meeting, the class examined “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Leo Tolstoy’s novella about a lawyer who questions his life as he is dying. Another class centered on two films. One, “The Story of Qiu Ju,” tells the story of a rural Chinese woman seeking redress for a government official’s wrongful action. The other, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” has no obvious legal themes and served to launch a discussion of the characters, form, beauty, and impact of the film.

Music, the visual arts, and other forms of expression were also represented. Some classes delved into jazz and R&B music and their direct connection to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, but others focused on classical music with no explicit political content. Outside of the classroom, the group spent an afternoon at the Yale University Art Gallery with a curator to view and consider a series of paintings. Students also shared their own creative practices and talked about law school’s effect on those.

Nathan Brown ’25, a poet who is now starting a career as a corporate lawyer, produced a collection of thematically related poems. While he did not set out to create poems shaped by law school, Brown said, being steeped in legal vocabulary for three years inevitably had some influence on his writing.

“I tried to embrace that, too, since poetry can be a means of displacing language from its typical purpose,” he said.

For Lucia della Paolera ’25, another student in the class, language is a thread that runs through a creative practice that spans literary translation, music, video, and theater. In fact, della Paolera said, her interest in law initially stemmed from this work, and her legal and artistic practices feed one another.

“My interest in working in the law, as an instrument for the defense or service of others, was one answer to a series of questions I’ve been exploring in my creative work, thinking about the power and limits of language and the making and remaking of tradition,” she said.

Before law school, della Paolera co-founded COTC NYC, a music company that makes site-specific music performances. She stayed active in music, translation, and performance while studying law, returning to New York to rehearse and perform on weekends. But many law students who start out in the arts do not continue their earlier work, Gewirtz noted.

Over the years, Gewirtz has heard from students who were active in the arts before law school, only to find that their studies left them no time to keep that interest alive. For some, art never regains its place in their lives, he said. That’s why he designed the course for students to examine the arts and integrate them into their law school work.

A central aim of the course, Gewirtz said, was to create “a community of law students with long-standing interests in the arts, and make this part of their intellectual life at YLS, not on the side.”

Brown, the poet, said interacting with his classmates through something other than law was the course’s greatest reward.

“The community that arose became a refreshing affirmation that studying the law doesn’t mean you have to snuff out other obligations or interests,” he said.

The community that arose became a refreshing affirmation that studying the law doesn’t mean you have to snuff out other obligations or interests.”

—Nathan Brown ’25

Mizuno, the violinist, said she valued having practice time and learning that her classmates included fellow musicians, along with novelists, nonfiction writers, and visual artists.

“The course gave me the chance to not only dedicate time to playing my instrument again, but also to appreciate the immense breadth of artistic creativity among my classmates,” Mizuno said.

“Arts and the Lawyer“ also drew in the Yale Law School community beyond students in the course. Noting that studying law and practicing an instrument are both often solitary pursuits, Mizuno wanted her final class project to be a collaboration. She teamed up with pianist Jun Luke Foster ’25, who earned a doctorate in music prior to law school, for a recital of works by Bach, Brahms, and Schubert. The two performed in Ruttenberg Dining Hall, home to a piano and packed for the occasion with students and faculty.

Among those in the audience was Lea Brilmayer, the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor Emeritus of Law and a leading scholar of conflicts of laws and international law. In a surprise announcement, Mizuno and Foster dedicated the performance to Brilmayer, whose love of music has been well known by students in her small group classes. Foster saw music as an apt tribute to Brilmayer, a musician who played concertina in a folk band before she attended law school.

Another work created for the class brought music to a part of Sterling Law Building usually associated with quiet. As a creator of site-specific performances, della Paolera always eyed the Lillian Goldman Law Library as a potential setting. For her final project, she conceived a work of ambient music for studying, performed in the Class of 1964 Reading Room on the last day of classes.

“The Long Last Day” brought together musicians on trumpet, harp, viola, cello, and hand drums. As they played, a sound engineer live-sampled the music, weaving in recordings of library sounds like rustling papers. Meanwhile, della Paolera contributed mostly wordless vocals that included the occasional legal phrase. Still, it was an ordinary day at the library. Some students stood up and took photos, but others leaned into their laptops and books and studied as usual.

For della Paolera, bringing together the two halves of her life — law and art — was a fitting end to her time in law school.

“Things coming full circle in a way,” she said.