Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect aims to help improve our civil discourse by engaging readers with challenging questions about law, culture, and why reasonable people disagree. The book follows the author, John Inazu, through a year as a law professor. Each chapter focuses on a different cultural and legal issue, with stories from the author’s interactions with students and friends that build on these themes.

Inazu does an excellent job of weaving together arguments and personal stories to help us see the complexity in hot-button topics. Each chapter focuses on a classroom discussion where he challenges his students on a difficult topic of the law and follows up with an illustrative anecdote from his own life. A tense classroom exchange becomes a springboard to discuss systemic racism over Thanksgiving. Interactions with a rigid-minded student help others to see the real people behind controversial topics.

Inazu takes great care to guide readers through hard topics they may have assumed they knew before. Do you really understand what the person you’re arguing with believes? What do you do if compromise is impossible (such as when a dog-allergic person is on a plane with a pet owner)? Is it possible to be value-neutral? Through questions like these, Inazu hopes to help people question their own beliefs enough to be more charitable to their opponents and smarter about their own viewpoints.

Despite the book’s title, there is relatively little instruction on how to actually disagree. Much of the material is about how to question one’s own rigid thinking, or how to graciously sidestep controversies. But this seems to address the problem of disagreement only partially in the contemporary world. We must also learn how to disagree respectfully, standing up for our convictions. And this kind of practical wisdom does not often appear in the book.

This matters because what people most struggle with – at least in my experience – is how to move from empathy to respectful advocacy. I’d assume the majority of people who are going to pick up a book with a title like “Learning to Disagree” already value civil dialogue. But what they will struggle with is how to conduct dialogue in a civil way, and what to do when a disagreement becomes uncivil. Teaching empathy without advocacy only means that the empathetic people won’t speak up. When I talk to people with extreme viewpoints this is one of the things they argue: too much empathy inevitably leads to inaction. And when books on respectful disagreement focus so much on the “respectful” and so little on the “disagreement,” it inadvertently confirms this.

Learning to Disagree is a helpful primer on practical empathy for beginners and a welcome refresher for veterans. It could have given more practical advice on how to take the next step in civil dialogue for those looking for that, but its insights are valuable and timely.