Law school in France is just like law school in the states

As I spend more and more time here, I am beginning to see more similarities than differences. I guess I am always like that: reactionary at first but then accepting. Anyway, although I am still irritated by the differences in format, i.e., the fact that classrooms can change at the drop of a hat and the hierarchy between professors and students is much more entrenched here, I am really beginning to see how this experience mirrors my experience at SLU.
For example, at its base, we read cases for the holding and the evolution of the law in this area. Sometimes the professor tells us what we are looking for and sometimes we are supposed to find it on our own. Sometimes the professors are really well organized and on point and sometimes they are not.
I am learning a lot, especially about structure. I think that I just typically reject structure intuitively but here, for some reason, it is easier to see. Maybe it's because it's in another language and I don't always get the full nuance of the law so I cling to the structure. In any case, I can see how things develop and I better see how you must methodically go through each step in order to analyze carefully the case. This revelation might explain some of my failures in law school in the states where I systematically skipped as many steps as I could to get to what I thought was important, which, coincidentally was not what the professor often thought was important.
I wrote a paper about this last semester criticizing my professors at SLU and, I guess, the pedagogy that is representative of law school. I claimed that law school generally ignores the important issues of race, gender, class and sexuality and even worse, pretends that these issues have nothing to do with "the law". Kimberle Williams Crenshaw calls this "perspectiveless" legal pedagogy which is especially difficult for minority law students who are basically asked to check their identity at the door when reading cases for fear of appearing "hysterical" or un-law student like. My own experience at SLU taught me that my questions about race were not welcome, either by the professor or the other students. While professors didn't explicitly do this, students definitely rolled their eyes at the mere prospect of discussing what they considered to be an "off topic" subject.
Until today, there had been no examples of the personalization of the law against which I could compare this phenomenon. Today, however, my friend Kristina questioned the holding of a case involving Reunion Island, one of France's former colonies. I won't go into the details of the case but basically it seems that sometimes France considers Reunion Island as part of France and sometimes it doesn't, which produces results with regards to taxes and additional charges that helps France and hurts Reunion Island.
When Kristina boldly said she found this practice contradictory, the professor at first did what almost all of my American professors did and tried to maintain some sort of strict division between law and politics. Further, most of the students put their pens down and quit writing. While they didn't roll their eyes and I won't risk a definitive interpretation of what their faces betrayed, suffice it to say they seemed to be indulging her. Sadly it seemed that Kristina was going to be told that the law was the law because the court had said so, that the internal logic of the court was clear, and that she ought to just accept it. Instead, amazingly, the professor relented and begrudgingly allowed that politics played an important role here.