Social Movements, Law Stories, and Law Making
Winter term, Block Winter
M,W,F 3 PM - 9 PM
Professors Marshall Ganz, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (with Michael Grinthal HLS 2006)
2 classroom credits LAW-46411A Winter
2 optional clinical credits Spring
2 additional independent writing credits available during Spring Semester 2007
Meeting times: Wednesday/Friday [Jan. 3, 10, 17 from 6 to 9pm; Jan. 5, 12, 19 from 3 to 6pm]
Enrollment limited to 15 students with permission of the instructors. Applications available from Janet Moran at jmoran@law.harvard.edu [Griswold 5 North].
In this course, we will look at the relationship between lawyering practices and social movements that challenge unjust social, economic, and political hierarchies. Much recent scholarship about the black civil rights movement (including parallel developments among Latinos, American Indians and Asian Americans), the feminist movement, the labor movement, the human rights movement and the conservative social movement suggests that such movements enact stories about social life. These stories then frame a public deliberative process, which ultimately influences the making and interpretation of law. In this view, one key role of social movements is to keep a story in the public eye and to confront, incorporate and challenge the received understanding with counter-stories. Where social movements are successful, a new story emerges. Part of this story is written in the law. Lawmaking becomes a way to institutionalize changes in background understanding.
We shall examine the usefulness of this narrative frame as a point of departure for investigating specific advocacy strategies employed by lawyers. Such legal strategies may engage clients' powers of moral imagination, solidarity, and critical deliberation or they may develop models of practice that enlist unlikely allies in helping to craft the storytelling potential embedded in the social movement. Our goal is to examine the challenges and dilemmas lawyers face in helping social movements successfully organize around a counter-story without becoming the movement's primary storytellers. Among the advocacy strategies we shall consider are rule shifting v. culture shifting; critical lawyering v. law and organizing; jurisprudence v. legisprudence; impact litigation v. lawmaking.
Students will be organized into working groups to produce short case studies, focused readings, or social legal histories that help illuminate some of the themes of this course. Rather than an exam, the course will conclude with a short (ten-page maximum) reaction paper to one of the case studies we have considered. Students will also have the option of participating in a supervised project and/or writing a longer course paper during the Spring semester in conjunction with the Written Work Requirement. A broad range of topics consistent with the general theme of the course is permitted for these longer papers. Those who write a more substantial paper for an additional credit, may use that paper to satisfy the School's Written Work Requirement or to earn additional optional written work credit. Cross-registrants are welcome.
Students who wish to enroll in the class with a clinical component must do so through the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs. Please refer to the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs website at http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/clinical/ for early drop/add deadlines and rules for all clinical courses.