A reflection on movement lawyering and post-law school

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" (Desmond Tutu)

As I'm nearing the end of my summer, many people have been asking what I want to do after I graduate. Here are my thoughts. 

I came to law school to learn new tools to address the structural causes of poverty, inequality, and injustice. I have been deeply committed to working on these issues both domestically and internationally throughout my life, and continuously strive to learn ways of engaging with the work I care most about in more effective, creative, and sustainable ways.

Many paths converged to bring me to the realization that I wanted to practice as a “movement lawyer,” and more specifically, as a movement lawyer supporting immigrant and low-income African American community empowerment. My experiences in international human rights work, both in Uganda and Myanmar, illuminated the variety of roles lawyers can play – as representatives, advocates, researchers, legislators, and defenders. These experiences also exposed the importance of being proximate and connected to the communities I am working to serve and of having a thorough understanding of the political context and stakeholders engaged in the issues and structures my work is centered upon. In addition, my engagement with impact litigation and direct legal services reinforced my belief in the limitations of legal strategies divorced from broader political and empowerment-based work for transformative change. I therefore spent much of law school seeking opportunities to mobilize the practice of law creatively on behalf of and through engagement with community-led organizations working to address the structural causes of racial, economic, and political injustice.

Many communities today, in New Orleans and throughout the world, are marginalized and harmed by structural forces that have been designed to maintain inequality, for the benefit of small, affluent, and powerful minorities. Structural and sustainable change to dismantle marginalizing and unjust institutions is only possible through a shift in power dynamics at the local, state, and global levels. I therefore believe that lawyers interested in supporting transformative change should use a range of direct-client support, litigation, and legislative and policy-oriented strategies with the dual goal of building the power of currently marginalized communities, and restricting and fracturing currently exploitative systems of power.

Recently, I've been trying to figure out where I'd like to work after law school. I've come up with a few things I think are really important to me. First - places where there are powerful and respectful relationships between the lawyers, organizers, and members. For, significant change can occur when the combined strength of both defensive and affirmative legal strategies and mass-organizing are combined. Hearing members here talk about how Congreso and Stand (two organizing arms of the Worker Center) have changed their lives and instilled a hope that oppressive institutions can be curtailed and used for the benefit of their communities has been both inspiring and an incredible learning opportunity. It also reminds me of the power I felt when I first encountered effective lawyer-organizer partnerships at weekly tenant meetings through work with City Life in Boston. Similar to the Worker Center’s strategies, City Life has effectively embraced the power of the “sword” (organizing power) and the “shield” (defensive legal strategies) to help build a robust housing justice movement in Boston that helped stem the foreclosure tide and is currently supporting anti-displacement efforts. I am committed to working within these models of movement lawyering.

Second, I want to work somewhere that is working to unite marginalized communities, not further dividing them. Organizations should be figuring out how to engage with both local and global issues, as well as issues affecting both immigrant and lower-income African American communities. This is the only way to make change in the context of systemic and entrenched racialized poverty, where different groups of working class communities are consistently being pitted against each other in a race to the bottom.

  

Finally, I want to work somewhere where I - and the people I'm working with - feel happy, powerful, and inspired. In many ways - that attracts me to very established places, because its often successes that build those consciousnesses. But I also love the idea of working to spread the model. That's what I'm trying to figure out now.  

For now, those are my thoughts. I'd love to know if you know cool places that fit in with this story. 

Writing from my new favourite place,
- S