« Back to Resources

A Few Interventions and Offerings from Five Movement Lawyers to the Access to Justice Movement

We are five lawyers who occupy very different corners of justice work. We are civil rights, human rights, and criminal defense lawyers, and we have worked at and managed legal services programs. We have taught law at law schools and universities and have built our own organizations. We currently work in interdisciplinary spaces with community organizers, funders, and other stakeholders in the justice system. As diverse as our perspectives are, we share a common belief that any mobilization around access to justice fails if it does not center the vision and strategies of larger social justice movements. We share here our collective calls to action to the legal community—and the allies that support and resource legal services—to expand our mission beyond chasing a standard of fairness that is impossible to achieve as long as we have deeply embedded structural and systemic inequity. Instead, let us reimagine what our communities actually need to be safe, free, and to live in our fullest humanity. We believe the role of movement lawyers is to use the law as a tool of social change, at the direction of communities most impacted by injustice. When we focus our lawyering on listening to community organizers, clients, and activists with a broader vision for social change, we can become partners in transforming systems, rather than simply making them more hospitable.

Download
Share:      
Uploaded on: Sep 20, 2019
Year Published: 2018
Co-Authors: Purvi Shah, Meena Jagannath


Resource Tags

Resource Type: Practitioner Resources Issues: Community Paralegals, Generalist Legal Services, Policy Advocacy Tool Type: Journal Articles & Books, Reports / Research Method: Improving Governance, Accountability and Transparency, Navigating Administrative Processes, Research Languages: English Regions: > Global, United States Nature of Impact: Acquisition of Remedy / Entitlement / Information, Change in institutional / government practice, Change in law or policy, Positive Impact, Sense of fair process, Status change