ReligiousLeftLaw.com

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.

Marxism & Freudian Psychology: Toward an Emancipatory Synthesis — A Basic Bibliography

 

I have a comparatively short bibliography dedicated to the aim of synthesizing Marxism and Freudian psychology, for complementary social scientific and emancipatory reasons: Marxism & Freudian Psychology: Toward an Emancipatory Synthesis. At the end of the list there are links to the much larger, respective compilations for Marxism and Freudian (and post-Freudian) psychology.

 

 

 

Can We Trust Hillary Clinton?

Of course, under the circumstances, Hillary Clinton must be elected President, but what can she be trusted to do? I will argue that there is a lot to worry about here, but first, some things she can be trusted to do. First, she will appoint Justices who will transform the Supreme Court from a dream of the Federalist Society to a moderately liberal court that respects equality, principles of criminal justice, and fairness in elections. Second, she will on most issues act like a Democratic President. Third, e-mail carelessness to the contrary, her brilliance, experience and judgment will make her a reliable anchor in foreign policy and national security (though many of us prefer she were less hawkish). Fourth, she will block Donald Trump from ever becoming President of the United States.

But there is much to worry about and not because she is more likely to issue false statements or shift positions than most politicians (though she is too slow to admit mistakes and has tried to brazen her way through). My main concern is that, according to Thomas Frank, Hillary Clinton was Bill Clinton’s main political advisor, and Bill Clinton campaigned as a progressive, but governed in a regressive way. Yes, he secured the earned income tax credit, and he tried hard for health care, but he stuck it to labor with NAFTA, set up a recession with the repeal of Glass Steagall (while currying the favor of bankers), endorsed a punitive crime bill, a bill that explicitly set far higher penalties for crack cocaine despite its disproportionate impact on African Americans. And, with explicit support from Hillary Clinton, not to mention Al Gore (over the objections of Robert Reich and even Robert Rubin), he changed welfare as we know it by throwing tens of thousands of women and dependent children off welfare. The party that cared about the poor and working people became the party that cared about professionals and people with money to contribute. Bill Clinton claimed to be a new Democrat. It was new; but it had nothing to recommend it.

Will Hillary Clinton follow the lead of Bill Clinton (and many others) by governing in way that is different from the carefully negotiated platform? One basis for concern is that she apparently would like to be a two term President. Unless her polling negatives drop, there is good reason to believe that she would lose to any likely Republican nominee. Crazy, as the Republicans are, they are not likely to nominate anyone as unhinged as Donald Trump. I think it likely that Hillary Clinton is not immune from the belief that a policy which makes it more likely for her to be reelected is the right policy to be pursued. Thankfully, however, there is good reason to believe that Hillary Clinton will govern in general accord with the Party platform. Although that platform repudiates the policies of Bill Clinton, those policies are not good politics today if they ever were before, and the voters’ anger over inequality is not likely to disappear over the coming years. Failure to follow the policies of the Democratic Party platform may curry favor with big business, but it will be a prescription for electoral failure.