What is Movement Lawyering
We believe in the power of working people and understand that organized communities, not isolated lawsuits, drive transformational change.
Movement lawyers work in deep collaboration with social movements, leveraging every legal hook possible to build the collective power needed to transform our political and economic systems towards human dignity, multiracial democracy, and ecological harmony.
Working within and in service of movements, we dream with and defend organized groups of everyday people—workers, tenants, students, and migrants—as they challenge the structural, including legal, harms impacting their lives.
Why is Movement Lawyering Important?
Movement lawyers treat the root causes of injustice. By supporting clients to become leaders in their own communities, we help create systemic change and shift power for a stronger civil society. This model is not only strategic, but more transparent and accountable as it allows clients to weigh in about where scarce legal resources are spent. By treating clients as partners, lawyers can help them assert control over their lives and their communities.
In order to reimagine our systems so they work for everybody in civil society, we must engage in zealous advocacy within the legal system. Investing in movement lawyers and driving the legal sector towards more movement-aligned practice is vital because legal work is ultimately about governance and democratic expression. When marginalized people wield law to defend community interests and fight oppressive systems, it strengthens the fabric of democracy.
Movement Lawyering Core Beliefs
Movement lawyering has a distinct starting point from other legal traditions: Law and lawyers have a crucial role to play in social change. Our core beliefs and underlying assumptions are:
Law is neither objective nor neutral; it is not ethical or moral on its own. Law is an important arena of struggle, but it has its limits and as movement lawyers, we are tasked with balancing law as both a sword and shield for advancing the causes of the most marginalized in our society fighting for social change.
Social change requires shifting power, culture, and systems. Social change involves going beyond the margins of systems, mitigating immediate harms or even changing laws. It requires redesigning the underlying systems and structures of society, shifting norms, and culture, and most importantly, changing who has economic and political power.
Social movements are the vehicle for social change. Throughout history, social movements have agitated for and won transformational change. From the labor and civil rights movements, immigrants’ rights, climate justice, to the Movement for Black Lives the takeaway is the same: when directly affected people take collective action, lead their own struggles, and build power to change the root causes of oppression, social change happens.
Social movements are powered by organizers fighting for a better world. Grassroots groups are the driving force behind movements to dismantle existing systems of oppression in our society. Through heeding their leadership, we can unify to build alternatives for a multiracial and pluralistic society that values and centers human rights and dignity.
What is the lineage?
History shows us when put in the hands of the people, law can codify social justice wins and transform our collective sense of what is possible. The concept of movement lawyering comes from a lineage of women and people of color who have been in deep collaborations with movements for racial, gender, economic, health, and environmental justice.
Lawyers have supported social movements for centuries, yet formal academic writing captures only a fraction of that history. The real framework of movement lawyering lives in a rich oral tradition passed down from practitioner to practitioner across generations.
Movement Law Lab bridges the gap between the formal academic writing on movement lawyering and the lineage of movement lawyering stewarded by practitioners across the world today. Our team builds on the theory and praxis of movement lawyering through our offerings to the legal sector and by being in relation with social movements we flank.