Community Awareness and the Education Lawyer

As we have previously discussed, the next draft should be answering the question the first draft exists to end up with. This draft says, in my view: (1) I want to reverse San Antonio IS v. Rodriguez; (2) here is a brochure for the Freemans, who might have the sort of practice I want; and (3) but I don't believe anyone will just hire me and put me on the payroll to do it, or will fund my 501c3 to do it.

One thing the next draft could do is to explain how you plan to reverse the case. That would start, I think, with which one of the various approaches offered in dissent is correct. I always thought TM was pretty much precisely right that this is a straight "substantive equal protection" case, even though it would have been the first of its kind, we can see large vistas of the America to which it would more or less directly have led. But that might not be what you mean to do. If it is, then the combination of precise legal issue (which is structurally like, "can separate ever be equal?") and the breadth of the social reorientation necessary to commit society beyond the Court to do what it takes to enforce decisions resembles very much the problem to which Marshall addressed his own life as a lawyer.

I order to do what Charles Hamilton Houston and others had worked to create, Marshall also created a mode of law practice organization and financing. That mode came to dominate the very idea of "public interest lawyering" in the 20th century. It is still relevant, but it is increasingly outmoded and inadequate.

What we need is also a way of contributing to the litigation and implementation of outcomes that are ambitious on the same scale, built on smaller lightweight forms of practice organization and small business forms of financing based on the lawyer's income from her own balanced practice, that were also present everywhere in the 20th century legal ecology, and which need updating for wider use in the 21st century.

So you could very productively use the next draft not to discuss the constitutional law, if that's not your present version of "where do I go from here?" to consider the kind of practice creativity that would ask: What do you want to practice about besides this issue, in order to have another specialty whose profitable practice can finance this work? Where do you want to work, in real geographic and social space? How do you need to use law school to fit you to get the results you will deliver to clients from your practice, and Who does law school have to help you add to your network who will assist you to deliver those results and to find and be retained by the clients to whom you will deliver them? Finally, How Much does this practice have to produce in order to make it self-sustaining, and to afford you the level of income that will satisfy the needs of your personae for themselves, for family, etc.? You won't know have the answers that will actually constitute a viable plan for your practice, but you will have begun training your imagination and charting your course through law school, which is absolutely all you need right now.