Community Engagement as a Foundational Lawyering Skill

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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For more than half a century clinical legal educators have engaged in community-based teaching, advocacy, and research. Early direct service and law reform models of clinical education imagined community engagement and the lawyering process narrowly in terms of rights education and group representation. Typically those models distinguished between law and politics, divided advocacy from organizing, and constructed lawyer-dominated client and community relationships. Second generation models advanced a more client-centered vision of the lawyering process but generally preserved the distinction between law and politics and the separation of advocacy and organizing. Contemporary models, by comparison, increasingly challenge the dichotomies between law and politics as well as advocacy and organizing. These emerging legal-political mobilization models explicitly embrace community-based visions of movement lawyering in both civil and criminal justice contexts. This Concurrent Session or Workshop will explore new clinical models of community-based political and movement lawyering both as pedagogy and practice. In this way, the session/workshop will address two core conference themes: (1) Foundational and Emerging Lawyering Skills; and (2) Clinics and the Community.