Law and Movements: Clinical Perspectives
As law-school clinics assume a growing role in legal education, instructors, students, and community partners have used clinics to test novel, sometimes radical lawyering approaches. This Collection draws from those experiments, using case studies from family defense, immigration, and worker rights to explore the relationship between law and social movements.
Transformative Immigration Lawyering
Two deep-seated tendencies in U.S. immigration law are obstructing the expansive reforms long sought by movement actors: incrementalism and path dependence. This Essay recommends that law clinics counter these forces by setting ambitious goals for structural change and by equipping students with knowledge and skills needed for transformative lawyering.
Radical Early Defense Against Family Policing
What possibilities arise when law-school clinics experiment in challenging a well-oiled system at its untouched margins, within a collective, community-based movement whose lodestar is abolition? This Essay examines this question in the family-policing context and articulates a radical vision of family defense in subjudicial venues.
Pedagogy of Prefiguration
Social movements are engaged in prefigurative thinking, outside of the terms and constraints of our present moment of global climate emergency and democratic crisis. This Essay asks how we may teach ourselves—lawyers and law students—to work with social-movement organizations on projects that prefigure utopian social arrangements.