We Need More Rebellious Lawyering

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Rebellious Lawyering, a term created by Gerald López more than 20 years ago, is a vision of progressive lawyering which utilizes a client-centered approach to empower clients and which integrates sociology and anthropology with law practice. Rebellious Lawyering requires lawyers to be knowledgeable about the cultures and experiences of the groups of clients they work with. It also advocates for a more comprehensive and coordinated approach to both legal and non-legal problem-solving in low-income and immigrant communities.

Where regnant (traditional) lawyering holds on to legal knowledge and is non-communicative with clients, Rebellious Lawyering seeks to educate clients and demystify the process for them. When clients understand what lawyers are doing and why, clients can bring relevant information the lawyers might not have known about otherwise. This empowers clients to make decisions they want to make for themselves instead of lawyers telling them what to do. Rebellious Lawyers learn from clients and community organizations and deeply knows we as lawyers have much to learn from community members. On the other hand, traditional lawyers distances themselves from the people they are helping. This means they do not learn from community members and are not sufficiently invested in the outcome of their cases. Traditional lawyering can often romanticize and objectify clients and their stories. This can often can be problematic when making assumptions about victims and what they’ve experienced as well in presenting cases in court and making assumptions. Rebellious Lawyering aims to humanize clients and to listen to their stories and backgrounds. Traditional lawyering subordinates clients while Rebellious Lawyers work with clients in non-subordinating roles using integrative methods of problem-solving. This brings in more people to help who have more information and is ultimately more effective. Lastly, traditional lawyers look to win while Rebellious Lawyers look to challenge the system and are not focused on winning alone. Essentially, Rebellious Lawyering seeks to assist in fundamental social change through community activism and empowerment of communities.

While this is just a first step, it’s a start. We need way more Rebellious Lawyers. We as (future) lawyers have a responsibility to participate as equals in the decision-making process with our clients. We have a duty to be communicative with our clients, to engage with them in the law so that one day our role as lawyers will not be necessary. So that communities can, through grassroots movements, engage with the law directly for the outcomes they desire.

How can we engage with Rebellious Lawyering in the law school and beyond? This is in no way even a slightly comprehensive list. But here are some beginning thoughts:

1. Grassroots collaborations outside of the law school with low-income, immigrant, and communities of color. This means sharing resources, strategies, and means. It also means doing to ground work to find more resources and creating new strategies.
2. Creating networks between communities and lawyers/law students working in both the public service and private fields. These networks would serve to share ideas and knowledge from diverse groups of people to reach the communities’ goals (like a knowledge base the community can add to and draw from).
3. Creative solutions. This means stepping outside the prison-industrial and nonprofit-industrial complex and listening to what a community needs/wants and not pigeon-holing those needs into current solutions.
4. Seeing what works and what does and being committed to fluidity and flexibility in meeting the needs of the communities we serve. It’s ok to be wrong (even if most lawyers/law students will never admit it). What’s important is to learn from what went wrong.
5. Sharing, sharing, sharing! Beyond knowledge and networks, but all types of resources. Open source and shareable books and programs.
6. Community created materials, lectures, and classes. Less textbooks written by old white men about black letter law and more books written by folks of color.
7. Participation and engagement with communities outside of the law school. This could be a clinical-like experience, community service type projects, or externship-ish projects.
8. Dismantling the entire current law school system. What does it really teach us anyways? But that’s a whole tangent for another time.

We need to understand how social change comes about. Social change happens when people without power organize and direct movements. Social change only lasts when it is driven by the people most affected in society. Our role as lawyers is to support these movements in any way possible. We have a responsibility to restructure the law and to dismantle systems of oppression. We need to adopt a Rebellious Lawyering approach to law school and to our work as lawyers. In doing so we will restructure how we think about legal work, how we listen to our clients, and how we engage with the legal system.

“Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is the illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to.”

― Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms

Suggested Readings:

1. Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice by Gerald López
2. “Achieving Justice Through Rebellious Lawyering: Restructuring Systems of Law and Power for Social Change” by Ashly Hinmon (http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=tma)
3. “Contemplating a Rebellious Approach to Representing Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in a Deportation Defense Clinic” by Bill Ong Hing
4. “What is Rebellious Lawyering?” https://rebelliouslawyeringinstitute.org/what-is-rebellious-lawyering/