Immigration Article of the Day: Modalities of Social Change Lawyering by Christine N. Cimini and Doug Smith

The Immigration Article of the Day is Modalities of Social Change Lawyering by Christine N. Cimini and Doug Smith, forthcoming in Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 26, 2023.

Here is the abstract:

The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Movement for Black Lives, Sunrise, and #Me Too pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology of terminology that names, identifies, and distinguishes the underlying characteristics and principles of prominent models of social change lawyering. Our typology is thus intended to create common conceptual ground in the field. The Article then applies this typology to the case study of one social change campaign to illustrate the ways scholars and advocates can use the framework to think strategically about tailoring goals and strategies to various sociological and theoretical factors.

The visual typology we create uses a number of strands to distinguish between the prominent models of social change lawyering including: notions of identity; ideas about how to effectuate social change; conceptions of power; values; attitudes towards law and legal practice; lawyers’ understanding of their role; lawyers’ relation to clients and impacted communities; decision-making processes employed; and the goals and skills used. By mapping advocacy to theories of social change lawyering and tailoring such work to sociolegal factors, our goals are several. We hope our typology will launch a conversation that enables scholars and lawyers to evaluate diverse lawyering modalities in light of lawyers’ conception of their roles, their theory of social change, and the contexts in which they work. We also hope that our typology provokes engagement and correction, in the spirit of collectively imagining new ways of inhabiting the lawyering role that support critical social change efforts.

IE