This was provoked by a PrawsBlawg post by Kelly Anders today that asked, “If you had to design a model for a ‘people’s law school,’ what would it contain, and how would it compare to schools that already exist?” I’m not prepared to design a model, but I would like to suggest some items (literature, programs, institutions, commitments, etc.) I think should be essential to the motivation of any such enterprise. What follows came fairly quickly to mind and it’s in no particular order (so I reserve the right to modify the list at a later date):
Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, eds. Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities.New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold. Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering. Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, eds. Cause Lawyers and Social Movements. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
William P. Quigley, “Revolutionary Lawyering: Addressing the Root Causes of Poverty and Wealth,” Journal of Law and Policy, Vol. 20 (2006): 101-168. Available: http://www.uchastings.edu/faculty-administration/faculty/musalo/class-website/docs/quigley.pdf
Ann Scales, Legal Feminism: Activism, Lawyering, and Legal Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Larry Lessig’s Commencement Address to the John Marshall Law School, an excerpt and link for which is here: http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2012/06/larry-lessigs-commencement-address-to-the-john-marshall-law-school.html
The People’s Electric Law School (h/t George Conk): As Professor George Conk writes in a forthcoming article, “‘Poverty law,’ women’s rights, employment discrimination, and public education were the foci of legal education at Rutgers. In those two decades [i.e., the 1960s and 1970s] Rutgers-Newark - which we affectionately called People’s Electric - presented a model of engaged legal education that was and is unique. No other law school to my knowledge has been so thoroughly characterized by a broad progressive social agenda.”
The Innocence Project: http://www.innocenceproject.org/
Therapeutic Jurisprudence (David Wexler and the late Bruce Winick):
Training in restorative justice: http://www.restorativejustice.org/
“CUNY School of Law is the premier public interest law school in the country:” http://www.law.cuny.edu/about.html
Stanford Law School: Three Strikes Project
Cornell Law School: Labor Law Clinic
LawHelp.org: helps low and moderate income people find free legal aid programs in their communities, and answers to questions about their legal rights.
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law
The Center for Constitutional Rights
The Ella Baker Internship Program at the Center for Constitutional Rights: “CCR created the Ella Baker Summer Internship Program in 1987 to honor the legacy of Ella Baker, a hero of the civil rights movement, and to train the next generation of social justice lawyers. Our program uses a combination of theory and practice to train talented and committed law students on how to work alongside social movements, community organizations, and impacted individuals. Through our program, interns gain practical litigation experience and sharpen their theoretical understanding of the relationship between social change, organizing and lawyering.”
Society of American Law Teachers: SALT
An understanding of the history of the National Lawyers Guild.
A deep familiarity with “legal realism,” Critical Legal Studies, and Marxist approaches to the law.
A Gandhian or karma-yoga-like model of professional responsibility and social service.
An acquaintance with the literature on moral and intellectual responsibility.
An intimate knowledge of the ongoing “access to justice” problems (Deborah Rhode) in our society, especially “the right to effective counsel.”
A profound understanding of the class- and race-based distortions of the criminal justice system.
A profound grasp of the historical, moral, and legal importance of habeas corpus.
An appreciation (for international criminal law) of the meaning of “victor’s justice.”
A Stoic-like commitment to cosmopolitanism.
A commitment to the universal realization of “basic human capabilities” (Martha Nussbaum).
An understanding of the virtues and vices of participatory and deliberative democracy.
A familiarity with the curriculum of “radical history” (utopian, communalist, communist, anarchist, socialist, populist, feminist, countercultural, etc.) exemplified in works like
- Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
- Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-Ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
- Cohen, Robert and Reginald D. Zelnik, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
- Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
- Hunt, Andrew E. The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
- Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.
- McMillian, John. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Miller, James. “Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
- Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
- Piven, Frances Fox and Richard Cloward. Poor People’s Movements. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
- Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000.
- Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.
Michael,
I'm pleased to meet you as well. And, no, I have not read Lubrano's Limbo, but surely will now: I'm grateful for the recommendation. Although he is sometimes a bit too apocalyptic for my tastes, this immediately called to mind the early writing of Mike Davis, who likewise had a nonstandard "career" trajectory.
Your work background makes you ideally suited to teach labor law, I envy your students! Best wishes, Patrick
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | 06/23/2012 at 10:00 PM
Patrick - This former hamburger flipper, midnight shift janitor, O S & D freight clerk, and US Air ramp agent/Teamster shop steward - thence to law school in my early 30s following a union decertification drive - is very pleased to meet you. (I assume you've read it but in the off chance you haven't I highly recommend Alfred Lubrano's "Limbo"). By the way, my labor law class is just a little different than the standard version, as you might imagine.
Posted by: Michael Duff | 06/23/2012 at 09:26 PM
Thank you Michael. I hope we all can readily assent to such acknowledgment.
Having spent most of my adult life in working class jobs: truck driver (the first time, delivering office furniture, and later for a recycling center back in the days when recycling was a far more labor-intensive operation than it is today: we used to run down the streets picking up bags of newspapers and throwing them on the run into the back of trucks, only to later strap them onto pallets stacked eight feet high!), sign shop laborer, dishwasher, security guard, amusement park food service and ride operator, forest service worker, including time on a fire crew (where I met my future wife over 33 years ago!), resident apartment manager (for a little money off the rent), landscape laborer, medical lab services driver, construction laborer, and finish carpenter (among other jobs), before coming back to the academic world in my mid-40s, and only then as a part-time instructor at a community college (where I am today). I therefore identify much more with the non-academic world than the academic one, although I prefer the latter because it affords me more time to read and write and, thus far at least, has only been hard on my eyes!
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | 06/23/2012 at 02:19 PM
Well as a blue collar graduate of Harvard and a now-tenured law professor and academic support director, I would want to start with a frank acknowledgment of class. That is, let's stop pretending that the average working class undergraduate student has sufficient shared knowledge with undergraduate students of privilege to be able to thrive without reasonable post admission support (emotional, spiritual, and financial).
Posted by: Michael Duff | 06/23/2012 at 12:38 PM
Thanks Steve!
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | 06/22/2012 at 04:31 PM
Terrific post, Patrick
Posted by: Steve Shiffrin | 06/22/2012 at 04:20 PM