Being a law student at 30 plus years old is a peculiar experience. Unlike most of my peers, I don’t find myself spiraling over grades and elite clerkships (Make no mistake – I spiral over many things. But, at this stage of my life, grades and gold stars aren’t spiral worthy).
Perhaps, it is because I have had the privilege of moving through many elite educational spaces. Or, maybe it’s because I’ve been seared by so many life-shifting events that access to even the most prestigious of legal institutions fails to feel precious. I think, however, it’s because my politics and ethics have grown along with me.
In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement is misremembered in many ways, some more harmful than others. One of those ways concerns the centrality of lawyers and courts to social movements and societal transformation.
The mid-20th century civil rights lawyer holds a special place in the minds and memories of many. Charles Hamilton Houston, Pauli Murray, Jane Bolin, Thurgood Marshall — take your pick. Yet, although these attorneys — and many others — played an immeasurable role in the expansion and creation of new rights, the stories we tell about law and its relationship to the Black Freedom Struggle often obscures other vital forms of resistance.
The Black Freedom Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s was unique in many ways. For what was, perhaps, the first time in American history, freedom fighters found courts to be a more reliable partner than the legislative and executive branches. Some judges were open and willing to read the U.S. Constitution in accordance with principles of dignity, justice, and equity; consequently, they rejected more than a century of hostile precedent. It was an incredible time. But courts are conservative creatures by nature. The jurist who interprets law — while almost always engaging in creation through the interpretive process — rarely seeks to be expansive.
Many, many years ago, while I was still an undergraduate student, I attended a small workshop with fellow peers and a few professors. Most – but not all – of the students had found themselves radicalized by the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. For many of us, the protest movements of 2012 and 2014 served as an introduction to organizing and sustained, intentional activism. One of the professors in attendance had been a law professor. That particular professor told us — and I will never forget this — that we should not invest our time and energy in courts and legal change. She said that what we needed was a revolution. She encouraged us to learn from Ella Baker, from Fannie Lou Hamer. She encouraged us to learn how to be in and of community and to commit ourselves to organizing.
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I often find myself moving through law school as an observer more than a pupil. I rarely feel like a law student. I very often feel like a social historian moving through a quickly shifting legal landscape. More than most, I’m deeply attentive to (and critical of) the culture of law schools. I could write an entire book on that subject, but one of the things that becomes clearer and clearer to me is just how conservative law schools are and how constraining legal education can be. This is true of even the most liberal or progressive institutions. Instructors compel you to eschew critical thinking and adopt the more restrictive precepts of legal reasoning. Although there is still room for creativity in legal thinking and practice, the culture of legal institutions is one that does not incentivize acting against the grain. There is a strong pull to assimilate and acculturate.
The most troubling thing I’ve found about law schools in this current moment is how poorly I believe they are training students to face a hostile landscape. Since the 1980s, the conservative legal movement has made gains in myriad spaces — across state and federal courts, in legal scholarship, and in law school classrooms. Moderate, liberal, and progressive legal scholars who may disagree on substantive law and interpretive enterprises, generally all believe in the power of rule of law. However, we are living through a moment where a fascist regime has made and executed a well-considered plan to eradicate what have come to be accepted as core, foundational legal principles.
This is not a moment where we can litigate ourselves to freedom.
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My own prestigious legal institution has taken an interesting but far from singular approach to addressing the changes we confront. Recent faculty hires have been pulled from the heart of the conservative legal movement. I suppose the thinking is, If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. There is no strong leftist organizing on campus. This is a consequence of many things: the admissions office’s targeted endeavors to change the profile of each new class of admitted students; universities’ McCarthyesque censoring of and attacks against student protesters, particularly those who organized to contest Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza; and students’ commitment to valuing the traditional signals of success: high marks, esteemed RA or TA positions, federal clerkships, and job offers from elite law firms or federal government agencies.
The sheer cost of law school is enough to make students buy into the conservatizing culture of law schools. A student who enters law school with a genuine desire to dismantle the entangled forms of domination under which we live often finds themself graduating with $150K+ of student loan debt. Interest rates are high. A public interest or community lawyering job will do little to chip away at that debt.
Others still, perhaps the first in their family to attend college or professional school, have obligations to many. It’s easier to care for loved ones on a competitive six-figure salary than a modest five-figure one. These students — quite practically and understandably — may enter law school with one goal and one goal alone: get a high-paying job and make money. I am in no position to cast judgement.
And then there are the power hoarders of the world. The law school students who are the children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of esteemed lawyers and jurists.
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I work with undergrads often, as a Teaching Fellow, Writing Fellow, and informal mentor of sorts. I meet so many brilliant undergraduate students who want to change the world. Many tell me they want to go to law school. I want to tell them to dream more expansively. I want to tell them to read Dean Spade’s incisive essay “For Those Considering Law School.” I want to tell them that they won’t leave law school the same way they walked in, and that these changes are not necessarily for the better. I want to tell them that many (but not all) legal practitioners are deeply unhappy, battling severe depression and major addiction. I want to tell them that law school and legal thinking prioritizes an individualistic view of the world when now is a time where we must think about communities and collectives. I want to tell them that legal representation is important, and there is *great* need for legal services in low-income communities; yet, ironically, unjust law is the very thing that has caused the need for legal representation in these areas. Law harms. It’s not a panacea. I also yearn to tell them that one need not go to law school to develop a comprehensive or critical understanding of the American legal system and process.
But the JD is a credential. Its holders demand a kind of social status and standing. I understand this too. And they would look at me with well-deserved criticism if I told them this while signaling “JD Candidate” on my own resume.
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U.S. history and culture are ripe with dissonance of various sorts. Nonetheless, watching an authoritarian ultra-right ruler be sworn into office on Martin Luther King Memorial Holiday felt like a particular form of ugly.
As of this writing, there has been no event at the law school about community lawyering or movement lawyering in these times. There has been a panel on federal clerkships and multiple emails from Career Services about students who fear that their federal internships will be rescinded with the recent announcement of a federal hiring freeze. A beloved community bookstore has hosted some events about living, loving, and laboring through difficult times. The contrast is telling.
When I was a child, I looked at Civil Rights Movement lawyers with starry-eyed admiration. I had a well-read biography of Thurgood Marshall that my nine-year-old-self carried with me everywhere. As a college student, I read Derrick Bell’s Serving Two Masters for the first time. It’s a piece I continue to recommend to future, aspiring, and current legal practitioners. In the piece, Derrick Bell talks about the costs of integration. He talks about how the goals of the NAACP-LDF –integration of public schools and formal legal change — often elided the goals of Black parents and students — safe, well-funded, well-resourced schools and quality education. LDF lawyers frequently subordinated the desires of their own clients to the desires of elite civil rights actors and institutions. This not only raises critical questions about issues in legal ethics and professional responsibility but also says something about the tensions that can exist between lawyers, the institutions for which they work, and the communities they (ostensibly) serve.
I worry. I worry about our over-investment in law and underinvestment in community building and organizing. I worry. I worry about the special elite status lawyers carry when, at their best, I believe lawyers should be regarded as providing a supportive but secondary role in social movements. I worry. I am concerned about the seeming lack of rage in legal academic circles and continued refusal take seriously the tasks left to us by the critical legal theorists of the 80s and 90s. I worry. I worry about our commitment to forms of thinking and knowing that are far more limiting and harmful than we wish to acknowledge.
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We are, as the sociologist Ann Swindler has said, living in unsettled times. Shifts surround us. How we move through these shifts, in large part, determines our survival. As I think I’ve made clear, I’m skeptical of placing hope for our survival in courts, lawyers, and legal institutions. These actors have increasingly shown themselves to be ill-concerned with meaningful community-oriented service.
People power and collective resistance will forge our path. Litigation may, incidentally serve as a tool, but it should never be our center strategy and ultimate goal.
I think of law as a tool we use, imperfect as it is, because it is so foundational to the economic and political ordering of our current world. But the goal should always be its eradication. There’s no bettering legal systems.
We must labor to build a world where borders do not exist, where we reject incarceration as a response to harm, where families are not torn apart, where people do not die prematurely from poverty, exploitation, or gender-based harm, and where we understand our role as stewards of this earth and its resources as essential to our collective survival. That requires much, much more than law and policy can give us.
On Becoming 