Group 6: Building
Community Power
Alt-Legal
Services: Re-visioning Lawyers’ Role in the Fight for Worker Power
Elizabeth Ford, Seattle University School of
Law
Can litigation build worker power? This question is the subject of a
long-running debate about lawyers’ roles in the labor movement as a whole, and
particularly within the community-based worker advocacy and service
organizations known as worker centers. On one side, scholars argue that legal
services undermine worker power, “atomizing” workers by encouraging them to
focus on individual solutions. But others respond that legal services –
especially recovering workers’ unpaid wages through wage-and-hour litigation –
is essential to improving workers’ material conditions and demonstrating status
quo vulnerability. While many organizations have worked hard to harmonize these
two perspectives, the argument has served as stumbling block, stoking internal
conflict between organizers and lawyers and in the worst case undermining the
organization itself.
In this article, I argue that the two sides of this debate are talking
past each other because they are assuming different understandings of worker
power. Thus, the article first develops a taxonomy of worker power, focusing on
countervailing power (power over) and community organizing power (power with).
Building on this more precise understanding of worker power, I argue that it is
possible to construct a worker-center affiliated law office that both exerts
power over employers to force them to stop stealing workers’ wages and builds
individual and collective power within communities of workers. Far from
rejecting individual representation, I argue that worker centers and other
community-based organization can strategically embrace this work through a
function I call “Alt-Legal Services.” An Alt-Legal Services office is a law
office dedicated to ending wage theft by using legal tools to impose
countervailing power on employers and by supporting community campaigns that
elevate workers’ collective agency.
Finally, I provide some concrete approaches to representation and
funding that an Alt Legal Services operation can take.
Community
Legal Education: Charting New Futures of U.S. Legal Power
Antonio Coronado, Innovation for Justice
This essay serves as an urgent cause of/for action and open call to radically reimagine the American law school. Across this piece, I argue that U.S. legal education’s current manifestation serves as a unique site of lawyer socialization, given the ways that our law schools normatively advance pedagogical, structural, and ideological harms in service of the settler nation-state. Through a historically grounded analysis of the law school as a distinct project of formal legal power, this piece insists that we work across
silos, jurisdictions, and time to build blueprints for "community legal education."
Drawing from movements of scholarship-activism in critical pedagogy, rhetoric, and abolitions, this piece proposes radical reforms to the U.S. law school as footholds toward freedom. In situating the law school as a critical zone of abolitionist struggle, I make the case that all educators, scholars, and advocates aligned with the work of liberation must jointly envision “non-reformist reforms” to U.S. legal education in order to more forcefully contribute to the abolition of oppressive formations of power everywhere. Only through collective processes of (re)imagination--I contend--can we dream of and develop liberatory futures where a shared right to legal power is the reality for all.
Discussant and Moderator: Jason
Parkin, City University of New York
School of Law