For Legal Writing Professor Brandon Stump, who joined the CSU Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faculty in the fall of 2020, legal writing was not always the focus of his ambitions with the written word. After graduating from the West Virginia University College of Law, he worked as a civil rights attorney representing victims of police brutality with Goodman & Hurwitz and later as a research attorney for the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Still, when he thought of writing it was often not written advocacy or dispositive motions, but of great fiction, poetry and other works of literature. Five years into his practice, he determined it was time for a shift in his career focus and decided to pursue his lifelong passion for writing and the arts. Stump return to school to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing – Fiction from the University of New Orleans, and completed the degree in 2017 after a pair of writing residencies in Cork, Ireland.
While satisfied giving up his legal practice, Stump still craved elements of what drew him to law in the first place – logic-based education, legal theory, discussions of what things were and how they should be. He reached out to the director of Legal Writing at the Duquesne University School of Law, enquiring about teaching while earning his M.F.A. There were no openings at the time but a year later he was brought on as an adjunct professor of legal writing. Stump taught for three years at Duquesne and spend a year as a Visiting Teaching Associate Professor of Legal Writing at his alma mater, the WVU College of Law, before joining the CSU Cleveland-Marshall faculty. During that time he fell in love with the process of legal writing and working with students.
“I also learned the power of the classroom,” recalled Stump of his early teaching experiences. “If a professor tries to foster a safe and community-oriented classroom environment, the class becomes more than a requirement for a grade. It creates lifelong bonds for the students and the professor.”
Stump is excited to join Cleveland-Marshall and to continue to develop his own pedagogy. His teaching encourages students to dive into the process of researching and writing from the very beginning helps create an invested classroom.
Stump, who has more than 20 years of acting experience and is a member of the Theatre on the Lake Theatre Company in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, naturally incorporates elements of his creative writing and acting experience in his teaching. He infuses class scenarios with elements of storytelling – constructing compelling and complex narratives and fact-patterns. He wants his course to feel important to students because of the materials, the skills and the gravity of the experience, not because it is required.
Comparing legal and creative writing, Stump explained: “Students of creative writing often think fiction or poetry have no rules. They’re wrong. Most first-year law students believe that legal writing is formulaic and devoid of voice and creativity. They’re wrong. All good writing has to meet the audience where they are with the expectations they have. Fundamentally, whether art or law, we crave logic, and all good writing, no matter the form, is logical.”
Stump also makes his classroom scenarios particularly diverse, developing circumstances for people of color, queer people, women whose claims have nothing to do with men and other underrepresented groups to simulate dynamic real-world situations. Stump’s personal experience with racial diversity is unique. He grew up in West Virginia, one of the least diverse states in America racially, and then started is his legal practice in Detroit as a civil rights attorney where he represented a population of primarily Black citizens who were fighting for the right to be judged fairly without fear or prejudice.
Stump credits his understanding of the relation of law and race to a pair of law school professors who he remains close friends with – Professors Judith Scully and Atiba Ellis. They taught “Race, Racism, and American Law” and explained to Stump and his classmates that American law has been defined by racism and how it can be used as a source for social change for marginalized people.
Stump is fighting for social change for another group of people who have been historically marginalized – those with disabilities. Stump himself was diagnosed with Autism. His article, "Allowing Autistic Academics the Freedom to Be Autistic: The ADA and a Neurodiverse Future in Pennsylvania and beyond," 57 Duq. L. Rev. 92 (2019), appears to be the first law review article published by an openly Autistic law professor.
“Autism is not just a disability, but an identity,” explained Stump. “We require employees to disclose certain disabilities, like autism, based on the idea that they’re invisible. Because I am an extension of my brain, my disability can never actually be invisible because I am autism and autism is me. I contend that disabled people should be protected in the workplace even when they don’t come forward and disclose their disability. So many Autistic people are punished for their behaviors, and those behaviors aren’t necessarily protected in the workplace. My argument is that autistic behaviors are the extensions of autism and that punishing someone for those ticks, eccentricities, differences, etc. constitutes discrimination.”
Stump was not diagnosed with Autism until adulthood and knows it would be easy to view his career success as a justification for past treatment. Growing up he was considered ‘different’ or ‘weird’ by peers and ‘a bad student’ by many teachers, and knows that many from his generation like him fell through the cracks. Stump wants colleges, and in particular the American Bar Association, to begin tracking the number of admitted disabled students, so that they can be accurately represented in shaping laws, university policies and procedures, and even classroom discussions.
“Part of my life’s mission is to speak uncomfortable truths about my identity as an Autistic person to normalize an unapologetic, disabled presence,” Stump said. “So many view disability as an impediment or something that can be overcome rather than as an identity. In order to change the world on disability issues, we have to follow the examples of the queer liberation movement and the Civil Rights Movement – we have to come out and love ourselves in a society that doesn’t like different. I’m willing to put myself out there and be the catalyst for this change.”
“I wouldn’t trade my disability for a non-disabled life. I like the way I view the world. When all the components are added together, the result is me. And I like me.”