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i’m wondering if we are at a stage where we should dispense of the frame “public interest law” or at least insist on proliferating more typologies.
there are debates over whether for example public interest law includes working for prosecuting agencies like ICE and local prosecutors — i find persuasive the answer of no
or consider broader question of working for government — generally considered public interest law but how do we think about that when so many electeds and agencies are working to destroy the commons and criminalize communities
and then legal services and public defense agencies do some amazing work; through an individual legal aid model that does essential defensive work at best; typically very little collective #work to transform underlying conditions or toward organizing for social change
now more than ever we have lawyers who are trying to implement models in service of movements, abolition, socialism, etc. that transformative vision doesn’t sit easily with conventional modes of public interest lawyering, which often turns lawyers into heroes and saviors
rather than comrades in struggle or thinking about practices of solidarity or a lens of building grassroots power and for greater self determination.
movement lawyering. community lawyering. political lawyering. resistance lawyering. some of the various alt frames.
movement lawyering. community lawyering. political lawyering. resistance lawyering. some of the various alt frames.
lots of legal aid public defender lawyers feel deeply dissatisfied with the limits of the individual services and litigation centered models; and the lack of space to talk about that at work.
lawyers and law students are getting radicalized. looking for new models, new vocabularies, for community and movement.
and so maybe public interest lawyering as a frame made sense a decade or more ago. now it feels almost reflective of an anti politics within law — a refusal to engage with the wide variety of ends lawyering services, very little of it transformative
and as with organizing, all the transformative work cannot be paid..... most of it probably shouldn’t be. so there’s that.
