“Ten Ways of Looking at Movement Lawyering,” by William P. Quigley, Clinic Professor Emeritus
5 Howard Human & Civil Rights Law Review 23 (2020): 23-43.
I have highlighted some material by way of an introduction to this excellent and inspiring article. We might compare this piece to similar or analogous normative arguments and accounts of the need for “intellectuals” (of a certain kind) in working class struggles and radical social change movements, drawing, for example, on the works of Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rudolf Bahro, Noam Chomsky, among others.
“Nadia Ben-Youssef, a radical, social-change, lawyer-friend told me that ‘lawyers are either servants of the people or predators.’ There are more than a million lawyers in the United States, but most of them are not servants of the people. Lawyers and legal workers, who are true servants of the people, are often engaged in the struggles for justice alongside communities of directly impacted people. They are engaged in movement lawyering.
Movement lawyering involves several simultaneous journeys that this article will briefly highlight: (1) education of how social change comes about; (2) learning a critical understanding of the differences between law and justice; (3) understanding how to work in respectful partnership with communities and how to actually begin the work; (4) a willingness to be uncomfortable; (5) developing relationships built on solidarity, liberation, and community; and (6) finding, as I have, that the foundation of our relationships and work as movement lawyers is based on hope, joy, and love. [….]
Lawyers doing legal work can be useful to movements. And yes, much of what the movement lawyer does is legal work. The keys to determining whether legal work is considered movement lawyering are included in the answers to following questions:
- Does the lawyer understand how change comes about and how important social movements led by directly impacted people are?
- Is the lawyer in a respectful, ongoing, and team relationship with the community?
- Is the legal work about building and confronting power alongside directly impacted communities?
- Is the directly impacted community making decisions about what the lawyer should be doing in terms of the direction, purpose, strategies, and tactics?
- Is the lawyer listening and learning?
- Is the lawyer listening to the community as much as they are listening to her?
- Is the community getting credit, support, attention, and resources as a result of the lawyer’s work?
- Is the lawyer accountable to the community? [….]
Law schools are full of courses about law. The courts are full of lawyers. Legal work is work done by lawyers for whoever pays the bills. It is often another type of commercial work for businesses. Oftentimes, legal work is actually anti-justice work. What is justice? Words related to justice are often plastered on the outside of courthouses. Justice is mentioned regularly at the swearing-in ceremonies of judges and new lawyers, and at law school orientations and graduations. But is justice furthered in the actual practice of law? Hardly. In fact, justice is often a counter-cultural value in the legal profession. Charles Hamilton Houston, a leading civil rights lawyer, said years ago that a lawyer was ‘either a social engineer or a parasite on society.’
No one can dispute that the legal system is based on, reflects, and supports structurally unequal distribution of economic, social, and political power. That is because the laws are made by those with power, and traditional power resides in corporations, governments, courts, and legislatures. People and communities with less power are usually shut out. If you carefully examine how laws are created, you will usually discover stated and unstated race, class, and gender issues are part of the debate and crafting of laws. The law protects power through reinforcement of institutional racism and systematic injustices based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class.
One way of critiquing law is to change perspective. Landlord-tenant laws might benefit landlords, but what do renters think? Current civil rights laws might look really progressive to white people given the way the laws used to be, but what about to people of color? Should corporations have more legal protection than their employees or the people in the communities where they operate? If private property is so important, why shouldn’t everyone have proportional rights to property?
Though social progress has been made, the gulf between the ideals of justice and the practice of law remains wide. People defend our current laws saying that they are much better than before, or that they are better in comparison to other countries. There is no doubt that many of our laws today and many of our institutions represent an advancement over what was in place in the past. However, that does not mean all of our laws and institutions are better than what preceded them, nor does it mean that they are as just as they can be, and that the critique on justice should stop.
Without lawyers, courts are effectively walled off from people. Few lawyers provide direct services for individual poor and working-class people. Visit any family law court, landlord-tenant court, or immigration proceeding, and you will find that the majority of people impacted do not participate at all because they lack access to lawyers or try to represent themselves. The overwhelming majority of people have no access to justice or law. Access to law, much less justice, is determined by money. Those with money can go to court, go to the legislature, and change the laws. That is why most lawyering is performed for corporations and the few with real resources. Justice advocates for communities of marginalized people are few because community injustice issues are essentially not on any legal agenda. Big injustice issues are well-insulated from real people. They are wrapped in layers of laws and special interests protecting them from influence by communities.
The idea of radical change scares some people because it is not possible to bring about radical change without reducing the power, influence, and comfort of those who have more than their fair share of the world’s resources. Some will say this is revolutionary. That is fine. Lawyers can be revolutionaries. Martin Luther King Jr. called each of us to join together to undergo a radical revolution of values and to conquer racism, materialism, and militarism. Martin Luther King Jr. did not say the call to be revolutionary extended to everyone except lawyers. He also did not call us to merely reform racism, materialism, and militarism. Revolutionaries are called not just to test the limits of the current legal system or to reform the current law, but also to join in the destruction of unjust structures and systems—to tear them up by their roots. We are called to join the struggles and replace them with new systems based on fairness and justice.
Radical justice work is what movement lawyering is about. The Latin source for the word ‘radical’ means root. Radical justice does not mean merely trimming the edges of injustices or reforming the unjust systems but ripping the unjust systems out by their roots and starting over. Thus, the root causes that support and underpin current unjust systems must be identified and dismantled. [….]
Our world desperately needs more movement lawyers and legal workers who will engage in radical solidarity and partnership with the communities of directly impacted people fighting for justice. [….] Our world needs lawyers willing to work with movements toward a radical revolution of our world. We do not need any more lawyers defending the status quo. We need revolutionary radical social change lawyers; we need movement lawyers.”
I will be adding the article to this compilation: Toward a Manifesto for a People’s Law School
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