Law and Organizing Lab

Introduction

The Law and Organizing Lab is designed to help students to develop and apply a broad range of analytical and change-making tools. The Lab seeks to expand the boundaries of traditional legal education through both classroom teaching and work with community organizations and partners. The law can be a powerful tool to disrupt or challenge inequality, oppression, and marginalization, but making durable change in the world often requires a sophisticated sense of how things work beyond the courtroom. Making ambitious change often requires a sophisticated understanding of community, politics, and power. Organizing, public policy advocacy and issue campaigning are fields that have developed valuable tools and techniques to spark change. These tools and techniques can and should strengthen students’ legal practice. The Lab will help students to develop new capacities and to deploy a sophisticated understanding of social change organizing and campaigning, and realpolitik - in partnership with deeply-rooted community organizations working for racial and economic justice. The Law and Organizing Lab is intended to spark discussion, reflection, and strategic practice, among students with a shared commitment, or interest, in using law to build a more just and democratic social order.

Course Description

The Law and Organizing Lab carries four credits, evenly divided between a two credit weekly seminar and 2 fieldwork credits for work on social change projects seeking to achieve racial and economic justice.

Fieldwork

The fieldwork component of The Law and Organizing Lab will consist of between 6 and 7 hours each week of team and project-based work with community and partner organizations on social change projects and initiatives designed to foster racial and economic justice. Fieldwork will encompass both traditional and non-traditional legal work, such as legal, landscape and issue research, power mapping, working with government agencies and elected officials, communications work, community education and social change campaign planning and execution.

Seminar

The seminar will focus on an exploration of what it means to be a lawyer committed to social justice today. We will explore different conceptions and strategies of social justice lawyering and the tensions among them. We will explore a range of materials, workshops, discussions and simulations designed to help students engage with practical questions about lawyering and the lawyer’s role in social movements. We will dig into questions about social change dynamics as well: the dynamics of movement moments and uprisings, the role of structured, democratic organizations, and what is involved in working to secure meaningful social change. Students will get an introduction to different roles attorneys can play in social change work and will meet a number of attorneys and organizers with different experiences of social change work and lawyering. Students will also delve into practical questions and skill development activities to help ground their lives as change makers. The curriculum presumes some commitment to, or interest in, the role that attorneys can play in supporting social change movements or collective social justice work, but we hope that the content will be useful and interesting to students regardless of their employment plans.

Application Procedure

Students should submit an application, resume and transcript on-line via CAMS. Applicants will be contacted during the clinic application period for an interview.

Student Contacts

This is a new course; there are no student contacts.

* 4 credits include 2 clinical credits and 2 academic seminar credits.