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As the demand for affordable legal services grows, law schools and the legal profession struggle to respond. By examining lessons from successful social movements in the last century, Cause Lawyering and Social Movements: Can Solo and Small Firm Practitioners anchor Social Movements looks at the Law School Consortium Project and its potential to participate in and anchor the social movements of our time. The collaboration of the law schools, networks of solo and small firm attorneys and activists at the local, regional and national level provide key elements for powerful change given the technological developments of the 21st century.

The traditional and most common conception of cause lawyers has viewed them as necessarily oppositional to the state, leftist, and, at best, transgressive. This conception is significant to our analysis because of its tendency to treat “the state” as a rather singular arena of power – an “it” – rather than a multi-dimensional entity made up of competing institutions and personnel. Following work on the disaggregated and embedded state, we suggest that conflict and competition among state institutions and state personnel allow cause lawyers and state actors to engage in mutually-beneficial action in service of their agendas. Litigation has important benefits for both cause lawyers and state actors: within the arena of law, processes that usually require the backing of large constituencies in the context of majoritarian institutions require, instead, convincing legal arguments. We briefly present evidence from two highly disparate cases of similar processes of interaction among cause lawyers and state actors in Vermont and Israel, which we believe indicates that this type of interaction is far from idiosyncratic.

The study of cause lawyers has focused heavily on the private sector, but both public and private attorneys bring voting rights litigation. This chapter first situates voting rights litigation within cause lawyering, as described by Scheingold and Sarat. It then suggests criteria for analyzing cause lawyering across public and private sectors and applies them to the attorneys who have done the majority of voting rights litigation for American Indians: The Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. The chapter suggests that the public and private attorneys are more similar than one might expect in their motivation, relationship to clients, and range of political strategies used. Their organizational practice sites differ greatly, but the dynamics of the public practice site confirm that Voting Section attorneys are cause lawyers.

Taking both an event-centered and a process approach to cause lawyering, the chapter asks: (1) if, when, and how working with movements can lead to one being functionally seen as a cause lawyer and (2) whether researchers should include “hired gun” and state attorneys in the cause lawyering conversation. These questions are addressed by seeing how various cause lawyer qualities are exhibited by a range of attorneys involved in anti-abortion protest regulation cases. The research suggests that reasons exist to view previously excluded attorneys through the cause lawyering lens, and to continue pursuing the cause lawyer qualities discussed here.

This chapter proposes that corporate lawyers be studied as committed to their clients, asking how they advance exercises of power by those whom they have chosen to represent. Currently, corporate lawyers are studied as independent from their clients, asking how they resist client demands. Such research continues despite repeated findings that corporate lawyers are not independent. This chapter explains the puzzling persistence of independence by cultural understandings of both professionalism and law. It recovers a submerged historic voice in which corporate lawyers are judged by their position in a network of relations. It argues that it was the organization of the corporate law firm as a factory which allowed it to become a professional ideal. Market competition has led corporate law firms to move away from a factory model to one in which commitment to clients, not independence from them, is the organizing principle.

“Guantánamo lawyers” are a variegated group of lawyers from diverse practice settings, backgrounds, and beliefs. Drawing from interview and archival data, this chapter explores why these lawyers have mobilized to work on Guantánamo matters. What processes engender “heterogeneous mobilization” (i.e., mobilization from different practice settings, and diverse professional, as well as political backgrounds, and beliefs) of lawyers? What are the impacts of such mobilization on the work of lawyers? Adopting a social movement lens and a contemporary historical perspective, this chapter identifies lawyers’ perceptions of their role vis-à-vis the “rule of law” as the most significant cross-cutting motivation for participation. The overlap in human rights orientation of legal nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the legal academy, and the corporate pro bono practice at top law firms, facilitates collaborative lawyering between lawyers. Despite some potential limitations of such collaborations, heterogeneous mobilization appears to contribute, at least in the case of Guantánamo, to a greater likelihood of resistance by lawyers to the retreat from individual rights in the name of national security.

This article focuses on one court case concerning the regulation of Anti-Abortion protesting and asks: (1) Do the various actors involved in this case recognize a tension between their actions and their broader beliefs concerning the regulation of political protests? (2) If this tension is recognized, how do the actors resolve it, and if it is not recognized, why is it not? While concerned with legal consciousness and cognitive dissonance, the article is framed by broader questions concerning tolerance and the interaction of law and political passions.

Handler's genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handler's rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.

This chapter examines how opponents of same-sex marriage have used rights discourse to construct an identity of themselves as victims, and construct gays and lesbians as deviant “others.” I find that conservative rights discourse has been more effective outside the courtroom than in it. This is because these arguments rely on implicit discriminatory stereotypes which are frequently exposed under the scrutiny of dispassionate judicial actors. However, in a popular arena, they are free to operate with considerably less scrutiny. Here, rights discourse is used to mask discriminatory stereotypes and lend legitimacy to positions that would be rejected if made explicitly.