A Motley Manifesto for A People’s Law School

This “manifesto” was inspired several years ago by a PrawsBlawg post of Kelly Anders 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, yet, provoked by her question, I would like to suggest some items: literature, programs, institutions, course material, commitments and so forth that might be essential to the moral perspective, socio-economic and political values, and pedagogical practices of any such enterprise. My menu of items is not meant to be exhaustive but merely illustrative or representative of what should (or at least could) motivate and sustain the creation of a “people’s law school,” one that is unabashedly of Leftist provenance and orientation, its fundamental principles based on the triune motto of the French Revolution: “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” My first post on this topic, “Toward a Manifesto of Inspiration for A People’s Law School,” is here. (Please note that this is intended for anyone with a passionate interest in the law and thus not just for teachers and students in J.D. programs.)

Requisite Books & (a few) Articles:

Abel, Richard L. Politics By Other Means: Law in the Struggle Against Apartheid, 1980-1994. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2009.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.
Bowman, Scott R. The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law, Power, and Ideology. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Butler, Paul. Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. New York: The New Press, 2009.
Chatterjee, Deen K., ed. The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Clingman, Stephen. Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. [For more biographies, see this page at Guerrilla Guides to Law Teaching]
Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Coady, C.A.J. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Collins, Sheila D. and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, eds. When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Cullity, Garrett. The Moral Demands of Affluence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Davis, Angela J. Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Denbaux, Mark P. and Jonathan Hafetz. The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown Publishers, 2016.
Dowd, Nancy E., ed. A New Juvenile Justice System: Total Reform for a Broken System. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
Düwell, Marcus, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Fallinger, Mary and Ezra Rosser, eds. The Poverty Law Canon: Exploring the Major Cases. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016.
Freedman, Monroe H. “An Ethical Manifesto for Public Defenders,” Valparaiso Law Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Summer 2005): 911-923. Available: http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1241&context=vulr
Freedman, Monroe H. “The Use of Unethical and Unconstitutional Practices and Policies by Prosecutors’ Offices,” Washburn Law Journal, 2012; Hofstra University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12-06. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2017178
Freedman, Monroe and Abbe Smith. Understanding Lawyers’ Ethics. New Providence, NJ: Matthew Bender & Co./LexisNexis, 4^th ed., 2010.
Garry, Charles and Art Goldberg. Streetfighter in the Courtroom: The People’s Advocate. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.
Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Greenfield, Kent. The Failure of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Hatcher, Daniel L. The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Henwood, Doug. Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom. London: Verso, 1997.
Houppert, Karen. Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice. New York: The New Press, 2013.
Kateb, George. Human Dignity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
Klug, Heinz. Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa’s Political Reconstruction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Lens, Vicki. Poor Justice: How the Poor Fare in the Courts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lepora, Chiara and Robert E. Goodin. On Complicity and Compromise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Lewis, Anthony. Gideon’s Trumpet. New York: Random House, 1964.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
Marks, Susan, ed. International Law on the Left: Re-examining Marxist Legacies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Mayerfeld, Jamie. Suffering and Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
McCrudden, Christopher, ed. Understanding Human Dignity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Medwed, Daniel S. Prosecution Complex: America’s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Patterson, Dennis and Michael S. Pardo, eds. Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Peñalver, Eduardo Moisés and Sonia K. Katyal. Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protestors Improve the Law of Ownership. New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Pugh, Allison J. The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Quigley, William P. “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
Rakoff, Jed S. “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,” The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014 (Vol. 61, No. 18).
Randolph, Sherie M. Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Rhode, Deborah L. Access to Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito, eds. Law and Globalization from Below: Toward a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold. Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering. Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold, eds. Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold, ed. The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make: Structure and Agency in Legal Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold, eds. Cause Lawyers and Social Movements. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Scales. Ann. Legal Feminism: Activism, Lawyering, and Legal Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
Shdaimah, Corey S. Negotiating Justice: Progressive Lawyering, Low-Income Clients, and the Quest for Social Change. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Shrader-Frechette, K. S. Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
Smith, Abbe and Monroe H. Freedman, eds. How Can You Represent Those People? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Smith, Christian. What Is a Person? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Stuntz, William J. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Taiwo, Olufemi. Legal Naturalism: A Marxist Theory of Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013.
Waldron, Jeremy (et al.) Dignity, Rank and Rights (Berkeley Tanner Lectures, 2009). New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Wolff, Jonathan and Avner De-Shailit. Disadvantage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Wright, Erik Olin, ed. Approaches to Class Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Institutions, Programs, Sites, & Sundry Material:

African American Intellectual History Society: the blog
Animal Law Resource Center
Center for Animal Law Studies: Lewis & Clark Law School
The Center for Constitutional Rights
Cornell Law School: Labor Law Clinic
Cornell University: Prison Education Program: “The mission of the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) is to provide courses leading to college degrees for people incarcerated in upstate New York State prisons; to help CPEP students build meaningful lives inside prison as well as prepare for successful re-entry into civic life; and to inform thought and action on social justice issues among past and present CPEP students, volunteers, and the wider public. We believe in equitable access to higher education and the transformative power of intellectual development. Our work supports a regional collaboration that brings together Cornell faculty and graduate students to teach a college-level liberal arts curriculum to a select group of students at Auburn Correctional Facility and Cayuga Correctional Facility. The credits can be applied toward an associates degree from Cayuga Community College.”
“CUNY School of Law is the premier public interest law school in the country:” http://www.law.cuny.edu/about.html
Economic Policy Institute: “The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions. EPI believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security. To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America. EPI proposes public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of low- and middle-income workers and assesses policies with respect to how they affect those workers.”
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.”
Equal Justice Initiative: “The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”
Food First: “The Institute for Food and Development Policy, better known as Food First, works to end the injustices that cause hunger through research, education and action. Informed by a vast network of activist-researchers, Food First’s analysis and educational resources support communities and social movements fighting for food justice and food sovereignty around the world. Food First gives you the tools to understand our global food system, and to build your local food movement from the ground up.”
Guerrilla Guides to Law Teaching: “The Guerrilla Guides to Law Teaching are a collective effort to acknowledge and confront our present ‘movement moment’ within our own classrooms. We share these statements on the basis of a collective track record of work both in and out of the classroom, as well as with deep recognition of our own vulnerabilities and with full awareness of the mistakes that we have made and will continue to make as we labor to meet our commitments. We think the moment demands that we move beyond our zones of comfort to seek and nurture colleagues and allies. We describe our vision in Guide No. 1, in which we detail our four principles: building solidarities, advancing resistance, broadening & deepening discourse, and pursuing radical interventions.”
IIRE (The International Institute for Research and Education): “The Institut International de Recherches et de Formation (IIRF) or in English International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE), is a Belgian Non-Profit International Association. It was founded by Ernest Mandel and has been recognized as an International Scientific and Non Profit Association by Royal decree on 11 June 1981. The International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) provides activists and scholars worldwide with opportunities for research and education in three locations: Amsterdam, Islamabad and Manila. Since 1982, when the Institute opened in Amsterdam, its main activity has been the organisation of courses. Our seminars and study groups deal with all subjects related to the emancipation of the world’s oppressed and exploited. It has welcomed hundreds of participants, most [of whom] have come from the Third World. The IIRE has become a prominent centre for the development of critical thought and exchange between activists. Our sessions give participants a unique opportunity to step aside from the pressure of daily activism. During a session, they have the time to study, reflect upon their involvement in social movements, unions, students’ organisations, etc. and exchange ideas with people from other countries.”
Indian Law Resource Center
Inequality.org “is the premiere portal for the public at large, journalists, teachers, students, academics, and any others seeking information and analysis on wealth and income inequality. Ultimately, our mission is to help end economic inequality in the United States and abroad. Inequality.org is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.”
The Innocence Project: “The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.”
Jacobin: “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 15,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 700,000 a month.”
Labor Notes: “Labor Notes is a media and organizing project that has been the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back in the labor movement since 1979. Through our magazine, website, books, conferences, and workshops, we promote organizing, aggressive strategies to fight concessions, alliances with workers’ centers, and unions that are run by their members.”
Labor Unions and the Internet: Cornell University Library/ ILR School
LabourStart: “LabourStart is an online news service maintained by a global network of volunteers which aims to serve the international trade union movement by collecting and disseminating information -- and by assisting unions in campaigning and other ways. Its features include daily labour news links in more than 20 languages and a news syndication service used by hundreds of trade union websites. News is collected from mainstream, trade union, and alternative news sources by a network of over 700 volunteer correspondents based on every continent.”
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
Law at the Margins: “Law at the Margins uses social media as a dynamic platform from which to highlight the ways our laws and legal institutions expands or limits the rights and social justice aspirations of people and communities.”
LawHelp.org: helps low and moderate income people find free legal aid programs in their communities, and answers to questions about their legal rights.
Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law.
Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine
National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
National Lawyers Guild
New Left Review: “A 160-page journal published every two months from London, New Left Review analyses world politics, the global economy, state powers and protest movements; contemporary social theory, history and philosophy; cinema, literature, heterodox art and aesthetics. It runs a regular book review section and carries interviews, essays, topical comments and signed editorials on political issues of the day. ‘Brief History of New Left Review’ gives an account of NLR’s political and intellectual trajectory since its launch in 1960.”
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.”
Poverty Law: Poverty Law for Professors and Legal Academics
Pro Publica: Journalism in the Public Interest
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law
SALT: Society of American Law Teachers
Therapeutic Jurisprudence (David Wexler and the late Bruce Winick):
Training in restorative justice: http://www.restorativejustice.org/
Three Strikes Project: Stanford Law School

A handful of moral, political, and epistemic imperatives, ends, and ideals:

A deep familiarity with “legal realism” and Critical Legal Studies, as well as feminist and Marxist approaches to the law.
Fidelity to a Gandhian or karma-yoga-like model of professional responsibility and social service.
An acquaintance with the literature on moral and intellectual responsibility, as well as notions of collective responsibility and collective wrongdoing.
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 “rooted cosmopolitanism” (Kwame Anthony Appiah).
A devotion to the universal realization of “basic human capabilities and functionings” (Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum).
Both a practical and theoretical (or philosophical) understanding of the virtues and vices of representative, participatory, and deliberative democracy.

A familiarity with the curricula of “radical history” (be it utopian, communalist, communist, anarchist, socialist, populist, feminist, countercultural, etc.) exemplified in works like the following:

Berger, Dan. The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Brick, Howard and Christopher Phelps. Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
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.
Curl, John. For All People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009.
Flacks, Richard. Making History: The Radical Tradition in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
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.
May, Gary. Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 2013.
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.
Muñoz, Carlos, Jr. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. London: Verso, 1989.
Ness, Immanuel and Dario Azzellini, eds. Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
Ness, Immanuel, ed. New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
Oropeza, Lorena. ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
Pawel, Miriam. The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
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.

Some relevant bibliographies under the (somewhat pretentious) title of “enlightened and emancipatory reading” for a “people’s law school” (once more, these lists are emblematic and not exhaustive (for example, there’s nothing here on feminism or family law…):

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08/31/2016

A Motley Manifesto for A People’s Law School

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