Law clinics and the clients and community partners that they accompany find themselves situated within systems and structures that are deeply resistant to fundamental change, and where prevailing norms tend to circumscribe the work of lawyers. In the face of these dynamics, law clinics around the country are experimenting with both their classroom pedagogy and clinical practice to equip students with the skills and habits to engage in truly radical, transformative lawyering–lawyering that articulates goals for major systems change, or that embraces approaches that disrupt established norms of the profession. Whether labeled “prefigurative practice,” “transformative lawyering,” or “radical early defense,” all of these approaches leverage the insider-outsider role of clinics to support both community resistance and law reform and to incubate thinking about entirely new organizational forms and legal systems.
This concurrent session will feature presentations from clinicians across different institutions who have undertaken this type of work. Apart from describing and discussing the structure, advantages, and limitations of existing work, the session will distill the core lawyering competencies that underlie these approaches and critically reflect on the role of community partners and movements. During the session, participants will be invited to consider how transformative lawyering approaches can be adopted in different areas of law and contexts, including their own clinics and communities.