Lawyers and social movements now : critical traditions and new directions -- A history of lawyers in social movements -- Movement lawyering in the new millennium -- The law-politics problem -- Legal liberalism and its discontents -- The empirical path of law and social movements -- The promise and problems of Mmovement liberalism -- Division : fault lines and fundamental problems -- Synthesis : integrated theory for integrated advocacy -- Reframing the foundational critiques -- Rethinking the progressive canon -- Past as future? reclaiming legal liberalism in illiberal times.
From riots to recession: lawyers in the struggle for Los Angeles -- Garment workers: the anti-sweatshop campaign -- Day laborers: organizing the corner -- Retail workers: negotiating community benefits -- Grocery workers: blocking the big-box invasion -- Truck drivers: greening the ports -- An equal place? Appraisal and implications
Financial and legal constraints on nonprofit public interest organizations have focused attention on possibilities for pursuing public interest goals from within market-driven private practice. In this context, the private public interest law firm has been held out as an alternative site for "doing well" and "doing good," allowing lawyers to take on large-scale social change litigation that nonprofit groups cannot because of resource limits—and big-firm pro bono programs will not because of business conflicts—while also addressing other deficits associated with nonprofit practice, such as low salaries, lack of training, and high turnover. Yet there is little research on how such firms operationalize their conception of public interest advocacy and what tradeoffs are required by the need to generate attorney's fees. This Article examines these tradeoffs through a case study of a nationally prominent private public interest law firm, Hadsell & Stormer, which is located in the Los Angeles area. It focuses on how the relationship between Hadsell & Stormer's private form and public mission plays out across three key axes: principle (how the lawyers understand their obligations to causes, clients, and communities); power (how the lawyers make decisions about firm governance); and profit (how the lawyers build case portfolios, staff matters, and co-counsel with other firms). Across each dimension, we see that the firm's hybrid form (part public, part private) is reflected in a set of hybrid ideals and practices (neither entirely public-oriented nor market-driven), which are continuously negotiated by the lawyers. I make three general observations based on the data. First, Hadsell & Stormer's effort to merge profit and principle results in a distinctive notion of professionalism, in which broad obligations to society, such as pro bono service, are generally viewed as inconsistent with firm radicalism, while micro-obligations to clients, such as zealousness, are embraced as part of the firm's commitment to litigation excellence. Lawyer autonomy in defining organizational culture and selecting cases is highly valued, which (in combination with the firm's strong client-centered ethos) results in a relatively weak sense of firm accountability to a well-defined external political constituency. Second, with respect to internal power relations, Hadsell & Stormer works to balance its commitment to egalitarian values—creating an internal firm culture that matches its vision of the outside world—with the reality of running a financially viable firm built upon litigation success. In general, firm governance tends to track the public-private divide, with broad decisions relating to firm politics, such as whether to pursue new categories of cases for political impact, made in accord with democratic ideals, and specific questions relating to firm economics, such as staffing and case management, made in a more hierarchical manner. Finally, although Hadsell & Stormer is categorically not driven by profit, it must make one in order to survive. To do so, the firm deploys three main strategies. (1) It spreads risk through case selection by (a) choosing cases across different categories based on double-bottom line considerations, and (b) cross-subsidizing high-risk "righteous" cases with lower-risk, higher-yield "bread and butter" cases and, less frequently, non-PIL cases that can be quickly resolved for predictable fees. (2) It increases productivity and spreads risk through case staffing, by (a) leveraging associate work in a conventional pyramid pattern, and (b) entering into flexible collaborations with other firms that allow it to expand or contract based on the volume of work. (3) It hedges downside risk through fee arrangements that allow it to profit from its comparative expertise (trial work) and recover irrespective of the award of statutory fees; the firm also over-selects damages cases relative to injunctive relief cases, which pose greater risks of no fee recovery. In the end, I conclude that firms like Hadsell & Stormer play a unique role in the broader public interest law field. They are optimally suited to complement their nonprofit counterparts by bringing more legal muscle to bear and filling in substantive gaps in the system of legal representation. They therefore achieve a central aim of the public interest law movement: giving voice to less powerful groups. In this sense, although private PIL firms may not provide more justice in the aggregate, they provide justice when it counts.
This essay—the introductory chapter to a book that examines the powerful intellectual legacy of Richard Abel—frames a central question posed by Abel's scholarship: Is the professional project of lawyers a political one—defined by the protection and extension of fundamental rights and equality under law—or is it instead a commercial one—determined by lawyers' material interest in maximizing the return on their services? Do lawyers stand for justice? Or are they an impediment to its full realization? The essay offers two perspectives—one empirical and the other theoretical—on this fundamental "paradox of professionalism." The first charts the development of the U.S. system of institutionalized pro bono as an example of the increasing interdependence of lawyers' professional and commercial aims. One lesson to be drawn from this examination is that to the extent lawyers assimilate their political project (doing good) to their commercial one (doing well), commercial ends define the limits of what professional means can achieve—with profound consequences for the quantity and quality of justice served. Building off this case study of pro bono, the essay then suggests an approach to understanding legal professionalism that attends to its multiple meanings in practice, but also seeks to determine how the competing ideologies of professionalism ultimately shape the overall distribution of power. Toward this end, it rejects the standard binary formulation of the professional project—are lawyers a force for good or ill writ large?—and instead asks: Under what conditions do which lawyers advance which projects—and what are the consequences for social justice? This question constitutes the central inquiry of the book, which seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between lawyers' commercial aims and public aspirations. Drawing upon interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, the book explores whether lawyers can transcend self-interest to meaningfully contribute to systems of political accountability, ethical advocacy, and distributional fairness. Its contributors, some of the world's leading scholars of the legal profession, offer evidence that while justice is possible, it is never complete. Ultimately, how much—and what type of—justice prevails depends on how lawyers respond to, and reshape, the political and economic conditions in which they practice. As the book demonstrates, the possibility of justice is diminished as lawyers pursue self-regulation in the service of power; it is enhanced when lawyers mobilize—in the political arena, workplace, and law school—to contest it.
Local opposition to day laborers is built upon a standard diagnosis of the day labor "problem" and a common approach to its "remedy." The diagnosis views day labor as a public nuisance that imposes negative externalities on a locality by disrupting normal patterns of business, traffic, and pedestrian exchange. The remedy involves the enactment of new land use regulations, known as antisolicitation ordinances, designed to remove day laborers from the street corners—thereby undermining their ability to earn a living. Such ordinances regulate immigration indirectly by criminalizing conduct engaged in disproportionately by immigrant workers. Their proliferation, in turn, has invited a specific type of legal challenge focused on the deprivation of day laborers' First Amendment right to seek work. This Article examines a pivotal struggle in the national day labor movement: the two-decade long legal campaign to contest antisolicitation ordinances in the greater Los Angeles area. It asks whether and how litigation—often portrayed as a nemesis of social movements—has advanced the day laborers' cause. What it shows is that litigation has been an indispensible social change tool in the fight for day laborers' rights, albeit one that carries inherent risk. On the positive side of the ledger, the Los Angeles day labor campaign has drawn upon strong legal capacity to mobilize a rights strategy, coordinated with grassroots organizing, against the backdrop of limited political options. It has thus avoided many of the familiar pitfalls of social change litigation in successfully challenging key ordinances. Yet, despite its success in preserving public space for day labor solicitation, the campaign's outcome rests in the hands of a federal appellate court, underscoring a fundamental social change reality: Even the most sophisticated litigation campaign ultimately hinges on the presence of sympathetic decisionmakers in the court of ultimate authority.
