Once We Know, We’ll Know What To Do

In a Facebook post last Saturday, after reading “What protesters say is fueling their anger,” I wondered what I could do to help eliminate racism, which is causing so much harm to our collective humanity.  I wasn’t sure what to do first.

As a law professor and member of the Sports Lawyers Association (including 2 years as its president and 18 years on its board of directors) for 30+ years, I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know and work with many persons of color as students and professional colleagues.  I’ve become friends with many of them.  During the past couple days, I learned that I didn’t know some of them very well.

On Sunday, I read a Facebook post by a former student stating: “Black people need your empathy. Put yourself in my shoes. I jog nearly everyday in the suburbs of North Dallas, but I run with my dog because I know that I somehow appear ‘less intimidating’ to the general public as a black man running with our family pet. . . . I have three kids – two of which are boys. I fear the day that I am forced to have the conversation with them that many Americans see them as a threat simply because of the melanin in their skin. . . . [O]ver the summer before I went to college, I had a police officer pull a gun on me in the 90s when he pulled me over simply because he said I didn’t ‘belong in this neighborhood’ where I actually grew up. He said ‘give me a reason’ to pull the trigger. I was merely a teenager with a gun pointed at the left side of my head during a traffic stop. I recall that day like it was yesterday.”

I responded: “Very sorry you personally experienced such horrifying racism (like so many others). It’s appalling, and NO human being should be subjected to and have to live in fear of it happening again! I hear you and strongly agree that racism must be publicly condemned, most especially by whites.”

He replied: “Thank you. I appreciate your awareness of the situation. . . . Have an intentional conversation with your own friends and family, on my behalf.”

Continue ReadingOnce We Know, We’ll Know What To Do

A Community Lawyering

(Gratitude to Rodrigo Sanchez for assistance in compiling data on 53206.)

The Shriver Center in Chicago provides training on a particular model of community-based lawyering.  They define “community lawyering” as “using legal advocacy to help achieve solutions to community-identified issues in ways that develop local leadership and institutions that can continue to exert power to effect systemic change.” The concept grew out of the older ideas of community organizing generally pioneered by Saul Alinsky’s work in 1930s and 40s Chicago, where, broadly speaking, the goal is to promote the empowerment of citizens, i.e. members of the community, to address problems and effect change. These ideas were applied to the practice of law at least as far back as 1970 in the form of a Yale Law Journal article where Stephen Wexler outlined a number of ways in which effective lawyering in an impoverished community is different from the traditional practice of law.

Whereas the traditional lawyering model sets up an adversarial dynamic between parties, community lawyering may engage alternative systems of relational power or power sharing aimed at ultimate reconciliation or compromise, founded on a recognition of common interests between parties.  (See Ross Dolloff & Marc Potvin, Community Lawyering—Why Now?, 37 Clearinghouse Review 136 (July–Aug. 2003)).  Whereas traditional lawyering may entail simply spotting issues that can be resolved through litigation or formal legal recourse, community lawyering can approach citizen-identified problems as opportunities to engage stakeholders in a broader conversation in the hope of building authentic, trusting relationships.  Whereas the traditional lawyer model is that of a litigator, negotiator of claims, and counselor to the client, the community lawyer’s focus may be to “develop inside the client population a sustainable knowledge base that allows the population to build foundations for opportunity from within,” to identify and defeat the causes of poverty.  Whereas in the traditional lawyering model the attorney is the “voice” of the client before the court, in a community lawyering model, the strategy and policies are accountable to the voice of the population being served.  The lawyer assists a community in identifying a structural barrier (access to economic resources, housing, sustainability, stability, employment opportunities, political voice, etc.) and then helps build capacity within the community to take action (through organizing, relationship building, advocacy, policy development, traditional case work, etc.).

The Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee applied for and received a grant funded by the Wisconsin Trust Account Foundation to introduce its related but unique approach of embedding lawyers into communities called “neighborhood lawyering,” focused on two targeted communities in Milwaukee. 

Continue ReadingA Community Lawyering

The Unprofessionals

In the decade after the American Civil War, Congress ratified three Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) and passed five civil rights statutes (the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1870, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875) in an attempt to integrate African Americans into society and provide them with the full rights and privileges of citizenship.  From rights to vote, hold property, and contract, to rights of access to the courts, public infrastructure, and the marketplace, these enactments represented a dream of reconstruction that strove toward a more universal application of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.  In striking down and interpreting these laws, the decisions of the Supreme Court played a crucial role in curtailing the promise of this older civil rights movement.  The Court’s undermining of the laws led to the legal segregation, discrimination, terrorizing, denial of due process, lynching, murdering, exploitation, and injustice that characterizes the African American experience in the century that followed.

The highlight reel that we all study in Constitutional Law class includes:

Continue ReadingThe Unprofessionals
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