Community” Lawyering’s
Effect on Social Change: An Immigration Enforcement Case Study
Christine N. Cimini, the University of Washington School of Law
Douglas L.Smith, Brandeis University, Legal Studies Program
Perceptions
of the American legal system historically relied upon the narrative of heroic
lawyers devising strategies to define
vague constitutional terms like "Equal Protection" to relieve
entrenched social oppression. The literature
exploring the role of lawyers’ effect on social change is expansive, but
continually evolving as conceptions and actual legal practices evolve. This
Article examines the role of lawyers in effectuating social change through a
close case study of the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration
enforcement program known as Secure Communities (S-Comm). Unlike existing
literature that has examined this question from the top down judicial
perspective, or the ground up movement perspective, or the lawyering focused
perspective, this article explores the question from the perspective of
government officials who ultimately made the decisions surrounding S-Comm.
Through an extensive review of internal government documents, this article
evaluates what impacted government decision-makers to shift the program from
optional, to mandatory, and then termination. Using
S-Comm as context, this Article seeks to advance the debate about lawyering’s effect
on social change beyond the constraints of the limited examples of iconic
Supreme Court cases into the contextually rich description of the kinds of
public policy battles that marginalized
communities, the lawyers who work with
them and activists are fighting every day. This Article explores whether it is plausible
that newer models of lawyering we identify as “community lawyering” have found
novel ways to overcome the undermining of solidarity and atomization of
interests that litigation is said to inherently promote and whether “community
lawyering” models transcend legal storytelling just enough to bridge lawyers’
stories to those of activists and mass social movements, and so overcome the
individualization processes of law, its grounding in past practices and its
bounded creativity. The Article ultimately examines whether a change in the
conception of lawyering is sufficient to subvert law’s well-honed and effective
tendencies against significant progressive change, at least in some corners of
the law-and-organizing world. Through these questions, in the context of a data
driven case study, we hope to point a way for lawyers and social movements to
thrive in each other’s stories.
Mini-Clinics:
Scaffolding Doctrine, Theory, and Skills
Joy Radice, University of Tennessee College of Law
Three years ago, I worked with first-year students to
create a one-credit “mini” clinic to expose them to lawyering skills and
advanced statutory interpretation. The expungement mini-clinic focuses on one
of the most significant criminal reentry issues facing people who have been
arrested for a crime – cleaning up a person’s criminal record. It also fills an access to justice gap by
offering legal representation for those of limited means. For one credit, students assist clients with
Tennessee’s complex expungement process from conducting the initial interview
to preparing and filing an expungement petition.