Christina Ruppert (2025)
Collaborative Consciousness Transformative Legal Education
Christina’s project emerges from her two-year empirical study, which illuminates the transformative effects of treatment courts—also known as collaborative courts—on judges, public defenders, and district attorneys. In this alternative legal landscape, professionals must adopt behaviors that conflict with their adversarial routines. Legal practitioners are now required to employ practices centered on positive reinforcement, social inclusion, family restoration, and proactive accountability. These courtrooms depart from traditional notions of penal philosophy and instead view justice as a shared community responsibility. Law school’s train students to focus on formality, legal linguistics, and authority, rather than content, morality, and social context. As a result, students develop a narrow view of legal practice. Through semi-structured interviews and observational fieldwork, Christina will be traveling across the country to collaborate with some of the nation’s most innovative judges in developing a collaborative curriculum to be taught in law schools. Law students should be encouraged to associate holistic practices with their future roles as practitioners and to explore diverse concepts of legal practice during their formative years.
Biography
Christina Ruppert is a Legal Studies major who graduated with departmental honors for her participation in the Honors Research Program, where she was formally trained by faculty from the Doctoral and Policy Program at Berkeley Law to conduct sociolegal research. After completing the program, she was selected for the prestigious Haas Scholars Research Program to continue her study. Over the course of two years, Christina developed a judicial training that thoughtfully synthesizes her undergraduate research into a highly coordinated and impactful presentation for legal professionals.
A proud graduate of a collaborative court herself in 2019, she has firsthand experience with how kindness, compassion, dialogue, and subtle gestures of fundamental human decency can restore human dignity and transform lives. She has dedicated herself to recovery, service to others, and higher education. Her goal is to become a treatment court judge and to help expand the use of the collaborative court model nationwide. She is applying to law school in the upcoming admissions cycle.
During her time at UC Berkeley, Christina served as a conduct caseworker for the Student Advocates Office, facilitated the Teach in Prison Program—tutoring at San Quentin Prison—and interned with the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office. She presented her research at the inaugural New Mexico Treatment Court Judges Summit last fall and actively contributes to her community by leading discussions on justice, incarceration, and social change with nationally recognized scholars and community leaders.
