Movement Law Lab brings the power of lawyers to social justice movements.

We do this by: 

  • Transforming the legal sector, training lawyers, and legal organizations to go beyond winning cases to building collective power. 

  • Building legal infrastructure for grassroots-led social movements. 

  • Reimagining law and cultivating new ways to democratize, decolonize, and deploy it.

We build legal firepower for social movements.

We are behind-the-scenes partners to coalitions seeking to build a bench of lawyers that can identify, triage, and respond to legal needs of individuals and organizations. We help develop a legal arm for social movements through deep consultation with organizers and grassroots groups to understand legal vulnerabilities and needs; recruiting and vetting lawyers to provide advice and strategy; and conducting outreach, training, and planning sessions for large groups of lawyers.

We train lawyers to go beyond winning cases to building power.

Our training and capacity building programs help legal organizations and lawyers develop the skills to work effectively with social movements and grassroots organizations. We’ve reached tens of thousands of community-based lawyers, legal workers and law students through our offerings.

We connect movement lawyers locally, regionally, and globally.

We bring movement lawyers together on the local, national, and transnational level to exchange knowledge, surface lessons, and work together. By cultivating transnational solidarity, we fortify relationships that increase capacity for innovation, creativity, and impact.

We create a vision and long-arc strategy for the future of law.

Transformation towards better societal systems requires changing the debates about the role of lawyers, law, and justice. To do this, we bring together social movement visionaries across sectors and communities to dream and scheme how law can proactively and creatively be used to facilitate systems change, survive the violence of our existing political and economic systems, and build a new world.

Movement Law Lab is responsive, collaborative, and future focused.

Our team of movement lawyers, organizers, and educators produce in-person and online gatherings, workshops, courses, and other resources to aid legal strategy. We enable emerging and experienced leaders to forge connections across issues, sectors, communities, and tactics to work alongside movements to provide immediate relief to people suffering under current systems — and to work towards long-term change.

Together with people’s movements, we organize lawyers into a force for human dignity, multi-racial democracy, and ecological harmony.