Leading Works in Law and Social Justice

Faith Gordon, Daniel Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book assesses the role of social justice in legal scholarship and its potential future development by focusing upon the 'leading works' of the discipline.

The rise of socio-legal studies over recent decades has led to a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of law, which prioritises placing law into its wider social context. Recognising the role that culture, economics and politics play in the development of law is important in order to fully understand the position and impact of law in society. Innovative and written in an engaging way, this collection includes leading and emerging scholars from across the world. Each contributor has been invited to select and analyse a 'leading work', a publication which has for them shed light on the way that law and social justice are interlinked and has influenced their own understanding, scholarship, advocacy, and, in some instances, activism. The book also includes a specially written foreword and afterword, which critically reflect upon the contributions of the 'leading works' to consider the role that social justice has played in law and legal education and the likely future path for social justice in legal scholarship.

This book will be an essential resource for all those working in the areas of social justice, socio-legal studies and legal philosophy. It will be of wider interest to the social sciences more generally.

1 Lifetimes of Commitment to Law and Social Justice

Jacqueline A. Kinghan

This chapter draws upon the leading work Lifetimes of Commitment by Molly Andrews. It connects the themes of the text to social justice lawyering and argues that it has the potential to shape and inform our understandings of how lawyering identity and values are sustained over time. Andrews has long challenged the notion that a commitment to political activism is limited to youthful idealism. This chapter therefore explores the work upon which this challenge rests and raises questions about how lawyers experience their social identity at law school and beyond, also suggesting ways in which social justice values might be sustained. I take an autobiographical approach and outline my own engagement with the themes of the text and its potential connection to legal education. In doing so, I consider the likely implications of Lifetimes of Commitment for the next generation of social justice lawyers and argue that an interdisciplinary legal and sociological approach to social justice education will facilitate a better understanding of lawyering identity in the future. I am extremely grateful to Molly Andrews for participating in an insightful, in-depth interview about her work, which I draw upon in my analysis.

[T]his is the story of a group of people who despite, or perhaps because of, their advanced years, still feel the urgency of social justice. It is this which has always inspired them and which still continues to fill them with a sense of purpose. These are lives of commitment.

When I first read Lifetimes of Commitment, it stirred in me a memory of my own pathway to law. Here was a text about a lifelong commitment to social justice: about believing that such commitment might exist outside the confines of youthful idealism and the importance of simply pausing and listening to the stories of experienced, tenacious advocates for social justice. On reading it I was taken back to the offices of a traditional commercial law firm in central Edinburgh in the summer of 2003. I was entering my last year of law school and had been assigned a mentor by the university as part of a scheme to promote access to the legal profession. My mentor was a senior partner in the firm, and as part of the mentorship programme, I completed a period of work experience at his firm that summer. The atmosphere in the office was often tense and strained; my mentor could easily become angry and be heard shouting at his paralegals and secretaries. There were a few of us who didn’t want to seem ungrateful for the opportunity but were struggling to find it meaningful, and the experience generally served to confirm my desire not to become a commercial lawyer. At the end of the placement when my mentor asked me about my future career plans, I said I wanted to pursue a master’s in criminal justice and human rights. To this day I remember him slowly leaning over to tap my head while shaking his own, lamenting that he too had been interested in social justice when he was my age. He told me about the challenges and pressures of the real world and about growing older and wiser. He said I would come to my senses.

I can look back now and see that it must have been difficult for my mentor to resist entwining my intended life path with the history of his own. I know too from my research and work with lawyers in law centres, charities, and NGOs over many years that careers in legal aid and wider social justice legal practice do not come without considerable challenges and pressures. Nonetheless, in recent years I have been struck by the familiarity of this story for graduating law students and early career lawyers working in legal aid and wider social justice legal practice. Almost all of the young lawyers I talk to tell me about being repeatedly warned that going into legal aid work would be “career suicide and how even their law school lecturers and careers advisers expressed scepticism at their intentions, which often left them feeling isolated and alone. As Matthew Smerdon, CEO of the Legal Education Foundation and architect of the Justice First Fellowship Scheme, comments in this context: ‘there simply won’t be lawyers qualifying in the numbers that they used to. Where is the next generation of specialist lawyers going to come from?’

In this chapter I explore how the leading work Lifetimes of Commitment has the potential to shape and inform our understanding of how social justice lawyering identity and values might be sustained over time. Notwithstanding challenging circumstances and societal upheaval, Andrews finds that the commitment of the activists in her study is maintained over many decades. First, I consider relevant socio-legal research in relation to the social justice values held by law students in the early stages of their education. Second, I present Andrews’ assertion, both in the text and in her subsequent work, that greater intergenerational exchange is needed in order to consider how law students might meaningfully connect their present and future selves. Third, I argue that the extent to which we create opportunities for students to glimpse a version of their future lawyering selves in the experiential learning opportunities we create might help embed what Andrews calls a ‘habit of responding’ to injustice. In my analysis, I draw upon the original text and subsequent work, as well as an in-depth interview with Molly Andrews about its ongoing relevance some 25 years after it was written.

Lifetimes of Commitment

In Lifetimes of Commitment Andrews closely follows the life stories of a group of 15 British men and women, aged between 70 and 90 at the time, who had all dedicated 50 years or more to pursuing social justice. The causes they worked on were rich and varied – from local housing rights and involvement in trade unions to the international anti-apartheid movement – yet all the participants in Andrews’ study are bound by a shared narrative of a commitment to social change. Their lives can be characterised by both ‘belief and action’, and Andrews finds that participants have a strong and well-developed consciousness of the extent to which these are interrelated. The participants are variously involved in local and national action groups, membership organisations, demonstrations, protests, and wider advocacy. With respect to action, many of the participants clearly express that their group membership gives them ‘strength’ through a shared commitment to particular social justice causes.

Andrews rests her study in the field of political psychology and challenges the “society-individual dialetic” by drawing attention to social reconstructions of knowledge within their historical, social, and political context. Her concern is not so much why people turn to activism in the first place or even the different tools they use to achieve their goals, but rather why they might understand and respond to their environments in the way that they do. Through meticulous narrative analysis, Andrews conveys how participants rely on their collective experience to situate their individual values and motivations within a wider context. She describes the involvement of one participant, Frida, as follows:

In the language of social identity, she wants to locate herself in a group. However, she connects this personal experience to a political one, implicitly asserting that the existence of a big movement adds legitimacy to the cause; simultaneously, it augments one’s perception that one’s commitment is the ‘right thing’.

Many of the participants, Andrews notes, “experience themselves as members of a community to which they feel responsible”. This perception of themselves lasts over many years, indeed decades, and is closely woven into their personal and family lives. The participants present a strong affiliation to others within their groups and believe they can make a difference through a goal-orientated course of action. As Hepworth observes, ‘Andrews argues that political commitment has deep-seated consequences for the individual’s conception of the self and its relationship to the external world’. As such, a lifelong commitment to social justice may involve leaving individual notions of character and selfhood behind as, together with others, meaningful group identities are created. This demonstrates the value of group identity over time, as well as connections between the past and the present. In this sense, the ‘wider message of the study is that positive aging cannot take place in a privatised individual vacuum but necessarily requires group support’.

Participants in the study stay on course: their commitment remains “constant but dynamic amidst the changing political tides of history. It is clear that they derive a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives from their political commitments. Their experiences, as well as the connections made in the text between social identity and social justice, are potentially insightful when considering the challenges ahead for the next generation of law students, social justice lawyers, and educators.

Social Identity and Social Justice

The relationship between social identity and social justice is relatively underexplored in legal education in the UK but has been developed in other jurisdictions. While personal identity refers to one’s own self-identification linked to personal values and attributes, social identity refers to self-identification in terms of group categorisation. What do we know about a law student’s self-identification and group interaction, including experiential learning, at law school? The socio-legal research that addresses whether group experiences at law school might incentivise a commitment to social justice presents somewhat mixed findings. Sandefur and Selbin remind us that socialisation studies in the US context generally “tell a story of decline and diversion” where during law school a ‘student’s commitment to work for the public good is either crushed or its meaning is changed to encompass more mainstream aspirations’. A dominant legal culture at law school can be overwhelming, as Erlanger and Stover’s work suggests, because if students fail to find refuge in a public interest subculture’ they are highly unlikely to leave law school with their ‘altruistic values intact”. Lopez writes in this context that ‘in many ways both current and past lawyers fighting for social change and all with whom they collaborate … have had to face trying to learn how largely to overcome rather than to take advantage of law school experience’.

Even for engaged law students it can sometimes be difficult to access opportunities to work on social welfare or human rights projects and casework. While in-depth discussion is outside the remit of this chapter, there are of course also issues of equality and social mobility to consider in this context. Clinical legal education programmes might provide opportunities, yet the impact of this work in sustaining a commitment to social justice is not entirely clear. Sandefur and Selbin’s large scale study of early career researchers in the US found that there was no general connection between clinical legal education and a later commitment to pro bono work. However, for those students who came to law school hoping to improve society through the use of the law, Sandefur and Selbin determined that their experience of clinical legal education may have been a factor in “sustaining or accelerating” their original commitments. They also found a significant positive correlation between participating in law school clinics and later pursuing public service employment for those students who came to law school with civic motivations. Their findings clearly suggest that the effects of experiential learning in clinics will be more significant for some groups more than others. Nicolson and Newman’s subsequent comparative UK-US analysis of reflective journal writing by students also argues that ethical and altruistic values are enhanced by experience. Other US scholars have identified the importance of experiential learning for creating provocateurs for justice” and “justice readiness”.

Many of the studies in this field rest on principles of legal ethics, including altruism and citizenship. However, Andrews’ work has the potential to illuminate our understanding of students’ awareness – whether individually or collectively – of their social construction of who they are alongside the consideration of their actions and decision-making. For those students who come to law school with social justice values and who were already committed to those ends, as Sandefur and Selbin suggest, experiential learning opportunities might help sustain those values. Similarly, by drawing upon key themes in Lifetimes of Commitment we might learn more about the relationship between experience and developing identity at an important time in students’ lifecycles. This is especially the case for law students who self-identify as activists or become involved in activism during their time at law school.

My starting point is to consider the extent to which Andrews’ work might be relevant to our understanding of the social justice “self and to the creation of learning communities relevant to social justice legal practice. Andrews asserts that social identity is often a product of difference: that in choosing one version of self we reject other possible versions. To this extent, social group membership is ‘an integral part of the awakening of political consciousness, as it is the foundation upon which social contrasts are made’. As we develop an awareness of ourselves, we must inevitably do so in a way that is related to our continually growing awareness of other people. For students there may well be a myriad of factors at play in the processes of identity formation:

[T]he very complexity of the way in which individuals perceive their social and political environment, and where and how they place themselves within that structure, is crucial to the assessment of social identity.

Indeed, Andrews asserts the importance of an “experience of self where you can somehow be agentic”. This relates to the capacity for social change, which is of course critical to conceptions of social justice and refers to an ability to transform ideas and social structures over time. Andrews stresses the notion of an agentic self where one might begin to recognise oneself and others as agents of change in both an individual and collective sense. As such, any counter-narrative presented by others in opposition to this version of agentic selfhood (for example, as explored in my own brief story at the beginning of this chapter) may serve to deny rather than facilitate the possibility of the emergence of that self in future.

While somewhat distinct from Andrews’ work, we might draw parallels in this context to the wider scholarship in relation to social movements. The question of why some individuals stay involved in social movements and others withdraw has long intrigued social movement scholars. Emerging studies of cause lawyers also rest upon the importance of networked interactions and the ways in which lawyers – across different types and areas of legal practice – recognise one another and reach within and across boundaries in order to collectively pursue change. Structural and cultural factors are both relevant in this context, and, while acknowledging some recent contestation in the field, this remains the case regardless of the side of the political divide upon which those causes might rest. Passy and Guigni draw attention to the importance of “symbolic dimensions of activism” alongside social networks and also stress that sustained involvement rests upon both structural and cultural factors:

movement activists are more likely to remain deeply involved when their embeddedness in social networks and their perception of such embeddedness in relation to their life-spheres are coherently and consistently interconnected.

More recent studies confirm Andrews’ observations and demonstrate that for activists to remain committed to social movements they need to not only be embedded in social networks relevant to issues of importance but also keep “a symbolic linkage between their activism and their personal life-spheres”. The relevant literature identifies other factors impacting upon the involvement in social movements such as efficacy, available resources, and opportunities; however, where networked participation and personal engagement become separated, it appears less likely that activism will be sustained over time. As such, it is important to consider the structural and cultural processes at play in maintaining a commitment to issues relevant to social justice activism.

Intergenerational Exchange and Social Justice

The ability to therefore, firstly, glimpse one’s agentic self and, secondly, to become embedded in networks that facilitate participation and engagement might play a role in allowing students to pursue and sustain social justice legal practice. In considering possibilities for engagement Andrews urges us to move beyond traditional boundaries in which we have become so entrenched. For example, over the last 25 years, she has developed the themes explored in Lifetimes of Commitment to consider further the dynamics of aging as well as the “narrative complexity of successful aging”. She argues that our tendency to over-rely on compartmentalisation” of the life cycle into stages means that we limit the potential for meaningful intergenerational exchange. As she describes, such exchanges are ‘after all the ligaments of connection between the world which we have been born into and that which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Law and Social Justice
• 1 Lifetimes of Commitment to Law and Social Justice
• 2 Decolonial Violence and the ‘Native Intellectual’
• 3 A Very British Domination Contract?: Charles W. Mills’ Theoretical Framework and Understanding Social Justice in Britain
• 4 Marx and Anti-Colonialism
• 5 The Law of Peoples
• 6 Naming ‘Femicide’
• 7 Feminist Legal Engagements towards a Transformative Justice
• 8 Social Justice and the Limits of Regulation: The Enduring Insights of Marx’s Capital
• 9 Mariana Valverde: Scale, Jurisdiction, and Social Justice
• 10 Policing the Union’s Black: The Racial Politics of Law and Order in Contemporary Britain
• 11 Larissa Behrendt – Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future
• 12 Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously
• 13 The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois
• 14 At War with the Court’s ‘Sublime Complacency’: Bob Woffinden Remembered
• 15 The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition (Martha Fineman)
• 16 Reflections on Law and Social Justice: Robin West, ‘Economic Man and Literary Woman’, Mercer Law Review
• Afterword: Intersections of Social Justice and Socio-legal Scholarship
• Index