In this episode of CRT2, we discuss movement lawyering and how its principles can be incorporated in legal education. Movement lawyering, also known as community lawyering, is a non-traditional approach to social justice lawyering that recognizes the limitations of relying on the law to bring about social change. Drawing from Critical Race Theory, movement lawyers acknowledge the role law has played in creating and perpetuating conditions of oppression. Considering this, movement lawyers learn from and work with communities and individuals impacted by these oppressive systems, instead of deciding the agenda for reform.
“Movement lawyering means taking direction from directly impacted communities and from organizers, as opposed to imposing our leadership or expertise as legal advocates. It means building the power of the people, not the power of the law.”
Movement Lawyering in Moments of Crisis, Law For Black Lives, American Bar Association Human Rights Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 2, January, 2021
Alejo Rodrigues
Alejo is Project Director of Breakthrough in Abolition Through Transformative Legal Empowerment (BATTLE), an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, and Chief of Curriculum & Storytelling at Zealous, an organization that trains and supports public defenders in partnership with local organizations and the people and communities they serve.
Susan Sturm
Susan is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. Her work focuses on inequality, discrimination, remedying racial and gender bias, criminal justice reform, lawyer-leadership, and the role education can play in creating social change and a more inclusive world.
The Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School puts these principles in practice in its project BATTLE, ‘Breakthrough in Abolition Through Transformative Legal Empowerment’. BATTLE is conceptualized and run by Professor Alejo Rodriguez, an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, who has direct experience with the criminal legal system.
In BATTLE, law students from the Black Law Students Association work with formerly incarcerated community leaders to design and work on projects relating to abolishing the prison industrial complex. In this podcast, we speak with Prof. Alejo Rodriguez and Prof. Susan Sturm, to discuss BATTLE, the prison industrial complex, the importance of lawyers and law students to learn from community leaders and directly impacted individuals, and how learning differently maybe the first step for law students to become agents of change.
RESOURCES
Black Law Student Association at Columbia Law School
The Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School
Zealous
TRANSCRIPT
CREDITS
Production
Written, edited and produced by Joo-Hee Kim, Gavin Coyle and Maneka Khanna.
Videos
Marbre Stahley Butts, Lawyering for Liberation: Movement Lawyering and Black Lives Matter, UCLA School of Law, Lecture Webcast (March 8, 2021).
Jeena Shah, Social Justice Lawyering Teach In, Rutgers Law School, Webcast (June 24, 2020).
Articles
Marbre Stahly-Butts ’13 on Movement Lawyering for Black Lives, YLS Today (February 7, 2020).
Community Justice Project, Purvi and Chuck: Community Lawyering, Community Justice Project (June 15, 2010).
Crissy Holdman. Professor Jeena Shah on Movement Lawyering and Building Power Through Organizing, CUNY School of Law (February 17, 2021).
Academic Literature
Amna Akbar, Sameer M. Ashar, and Jocelyn Simonson, Movement Law, 73 Stanford Law Review 821 (2021).
Betty Hung, Movement Lawyering as Rebellious Lawyering: Advocating with Humility, Love and Courage, 23 NYU Clinic Law Review 663 (2017).
Amna Akbar, Radical Remagination of the Law, 93 NYU Law Review 405 (2018).