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> | Planning My Practice
The Secret of Cook v. Raimondo
After San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, confronting property tax-based school finance systems seemed impossible. In his dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall insinuated that there is a fundamental right to education embedded in the Constitution. In an attempt to revisit this issue, the Center for Education Equity at the Teacher’s College has partnered with parent-student school groups to file Cook v. Raimondo. As monumental as this case is, it has not achieved the same level of national support as the movement toward abolishing the school-to-prison pipeline supported by movement lawyers Jim and Alexi Freeman. Source. There are comparatively few community-based organizations openly advocating for the fundamental right to education, very little media attention has been paid to the case and surrounding issues, and the nationwide community of students and teachers are generally unaware of this case. Without community-based support soon, any positive outcome from the litigation may resemble the disappointing and ineffective solutions following Brown v. Board of Education.
A Model for my Practice
Lawyers play a key role in maximizing communities’ power through legal education and support. The Freemans describe some key attributes of a successful movement lawyer from their endeavors to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. First, this lawyer must have a sophisticated understanding of the power landscape around particular issues within each of our communities. Thereafter, they must link their work with organizing, strategic communications, and grassroots-led policy advocacy strategies. A movement lawyer further understands the sources of their opponent’s power and how it compares to the power within the communities they serve to identify methods to reshape those dynamics. In every source from which a community derives its power, there is a legal contribution which can be made in support of the movement. The Freeman’s examples include research on legal and policy contexts, facilitating lobbying visits, negotiation assistance, performing outreach through legal networks, educating members on legal rights, and filing legal complaints.
Planning My Practice
On What Issues Will I Focus?
Using the Freeman’s practice as a model, the first focus area I would like to introduce in my practice involves movement lawyering for the fundamental right to education. This focus might involve performing legal outreach to support groups across the country, educating community members on their existing legal rights to an adequate education, filing legal complaints or documentation for public assembly, and representing students and teachers. Another area that intrigues me is mental health law, especially because of its close relationship with education. I would imagine that this portion of my practice would demand direct client services rather than the skills associated with movement lawyering. Similarly, I have developed an interest in copyright law, especially as it relates to free use and educational materials, and I suspect that this aspect of my practice will depend on direct client services.
Where Will I Host My Practice?
There are a number of reasons why locating my practice in New Y0rk is favorable. For one, the Center for Education Equity at Columbia University is deeply involved in Cook v. Raimondo. If my goal is to embolden grassroots supporters of the fundamental right to education, it would be helpful to be located close to the center of the movement. Additionally, my professional network will most likely be strongest in New York City, though I could expand the “location” of my network by reaching out to lawyers and legal organizations elsewhere. Generally, I think that my practice will best be located in New York City when I initially graduate, but I may venture to Washington, D.C. for the purpose of being closer to policymakers. The consequences of the pandemic, though, lead me to believe that the location of my practice may remain flexible.
How Can Law School Prepare Me and Who Will Help Me?
The most obvious benefits of law school stem from the classes I choose to take. By merely allowing my interests to guide me, the law school can provide me with a basic understanding of the concepts I need to know. Classes like Mental Health Law, Copyright Law, and Planning Your Practice, for instance, are the most logical choices for expanding my basic legal understandings. Outside of the law school, too, it would likely be to my benefit to take courses at the Teachers’ College related to education policy and the law.
In addition, professors and career counselors at the law school can provide guidance on how I might plan my practice. Meeting with professors at office hours or for coffee over Zoom has proven beneficial. It is my goal to continue relying on professors whom I trust and with whom I have had positive conversations to support me. Academic advisors at SJI have also clarified much of my confusion regarding the legal profession and my place in it.
Finally, I have found a reliable network of students and practicing education lawyers through Columbia’s Education Law and Policy Society. While I was told by other students that dedication to a club can be a “waste of time,” I have found it to be one of the most informational experiences. I intend to continue to rely on this group to grow my network and learn more about my role in the law. | | | | |
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< | Community Awareness and the Education Lawyer
It's About Power, Not Policy: Movement Lawyering for Large-Scale Social Change
Alexi and Jim Freeman worked as legal advocates at Advancement Project with a particular focus on the Ending the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track project. There, they partnered with local grassroots-led community organizations to wage advocacy campaigns and build social movements to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Ending the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track was successful, but the Freemans share an interesting anecdote about how they made substantial progress toward their goals:
We, like many aspiring progressive lawyers, left law school deeply passionate about addressing large systemic injustices…that continually produced the oppression, subordination, and disempowerment of low-income communities of color, in particular…[but] every advocacy strategy we had learned in law school was virtually worthless. Source.
How Does Social Change Happen?
Understanding the Cause of Continued Oppression
Many progressive lawyers—even though they are “right” insofar as justice, morality, constitutional principles, and a reasonable understanding of society is concerned—are consistently finding themselves “on the losing end of important cases and public policy debates.” Source. The Freemans found themselves in a similar situation, and they decided to examine their own theory of social change by learning from community organizers and grassroots leaders from across the country. These individuals had been successful in addressing systemic injustices in their communities, the Freemans explain, because “their proposed reforms [were] designed to shift the balance of power,” not policy. Source. Grassroots organizers addressed the root of the problem by building upon the power they had in their communities to demand change.
The Social Change Power Meter
A tool the Freemans use for understanding the power dynamics of the communities they serve is the Social Change Power Meter. “It starts with the assumption that large-scale systemic injustice is the result of power imbalances, meaning the beneficiaries of the system have greater power than those that are oppressed by it.” Source. Then, a social justice lawyer can divide the sources of these powers into political, communications and media, grassroots support, or legal sources of power. The analysis then moves to deciding how resources can be deployed to build the power of the communities we serve by maximizing the source of power which provides them a comparative advantage; usually this is the grassroots or media source.
The Lawyer’s Role in Instigating Social Change
Attributes of a Social Justice Lawyer
Lawyers play a key role in maximizing communities’ power through legal education and support. The Freemans describe some key attributes of a successful movement lawyer. First, this lawyer must have a sophisticated understanding of the power landscape around particular issues within each of our communities. Thereafter, they must link their work with organizing, strategic communications, and grassroots-led policy advocacy strategies. A movement lawyer further understands the sources of their opponent’s power and how it compares to the power within the communities they serve to identify methods to reshape those dynamics.
Examples of a Legal Activities
In every source from which a community derives its power, there is a legal contribution which can be made in support of the movement. In their own efforts to abolish the school-to-prison pipeline, they noted that with these strategies, the “little hope of addressing the harm and suffering cause by the school-to-prison pipeline…a decade later…has turned, and virtually all of the momentum in this field is directed at eliminating the unnecessary exclusion, pushout, and criminalization of K-12 students.” Source. The Freeman’s examples include research on legal and policy contexts, facilitating lobbying visits, negotiation assistance, performing outreach through legal networks, educating members on legal rights, and filing legal complaints. They allege that “there are no limits to what can be accomplished when movement lawyers embrace multi-faceted grassroots power-building.” Source.
What the Education Lawyer Must Do Now
Current Issues & Solutions
After the disappointment of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, confronting a “root” of education inequity, that being property tax-based school finance systems, seemed impossible. In his dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall insinuated that there is a fundamental right to education embedded in the Constitution. In an attempt to revisit this issue, the Center for Education Equity at the Teacher’s College has partnered with parent-student school groups to file Cook v. Raimondo. As monumental as this case is, it has not achieved the same level of national support as the movement toward abolishing school-to-prison pipeline. There are comparatively few community-based organizations openly advocating for the fundamental right to education, very little media attention has been paid to the case and surrounding issues, and the nationwide community of students and teachers are generally unaware of this case. Without community-based support soon, any positive outcome from the litigation may resemble the disappointing and ineffective solutions following Brown v. Board of Education.
Situating Myself in the Legal Issue
A practice that fits my needs is one which addresses issues of systemic education inequity from within communities directly affected by the issue. For me, the practical evidence that grassroots-based movement lawyering is more effective in instigating long-term societal change is decisive, and I am intrigued by the possibility of establishing a fundamental right to an adequate public education. It only seems logical that I might build my own practice within an organization that allows me to use the strategies offered by the Freemans to build community support of the right to education. Advancement Project, at which the two worked, recently filed an amicus brief in support of appellants in Cook v. Raimondo, as have other community-based education organizations. However, the link between their support is lacking, as evidenced by a seemingly static power dynamic between those benefiting from inequitable education and those harmed by it. Currently, I simply do not know if there is an organization which has the bandwidth to build the needed community support, but I also do not think I could start my own practice to do so upon graduation. Where do I go from here?
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.
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> | How Much Do I Need This Practice to Make?
I often struggle with this question, mostly because I fear that I am expecting too much from a public interest practice. Yet I am also very aware of the fact that this work is difficult, I will have a highly desirable degree upon graduation, and I want to be able to support a family with children. This is precisely the question that places my different personae at odds. If I set aside my concerns, I would be happy if I were able to provide for myself an annual salary around $100,000 after 10 years of dedication to my practice. I am unsure if this is an ambitious goal, but I have another two years to make adjustments along the way, if need be. | | |
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