Reflections of Community Organizers: Lawyering for Empowerment of Community Organizations
![handle is hein.journals/onulr21 and id is 465 raw text is: Reflections of Community Organizers: Lawyering for
Empowerment of Community Organizations
WILLIAM P. QUIGLEY'
Poverty will not be stopped by people who are not poor. If poverty
is stopped, it will be stopped by poor people. And poor people can
stop poverty only if they work at it together. The lawyer who wants
to serve poor people must put his skills to the task of helping poor
people organize themselves.2
Empowerment lawyering with organizations of the poor and
powerless differs from corporate lawyering or criminal defense law-
yering in purpose, substance and style. It also differs from traditional
public interest lawyering in significant respects.3
The purpose of empowerment lawyering with community organ-
izations is to enable a group of people to gain control of the forces
1. Assistant Professor and Director of Gillis Long Poverty Law Center, Loyola Uni-
versity School of Law, New Orleans, Louisiana. The author wishes to thank Anthony Alfieri,
Steve Bachmann, Ron Chisom, Pam Karlan, Martha Mahoney, Barbara Major, Jack Nelson,
Wade Rathke, Florence Roisman, and Elizabeth Scott for their help.
Many of these ideas were first presented at the Joint Conference on Lawyering presented by
the University of Liverpool Law School and the University of California at Los Angeles School
of Law at Lake Windermere, UK.
2. Stephen Wexler, Practicing Law for Poor People, 79 YALE L.J. 1049, 1053 (1970).
Professor Anthony Alfieri says this quote is an autocite for writers about advocacy with
poor and powerless people. There is a very good reason it is cited so much. It is because there
are so few examples of quotable legal writing about poor people and organizing.
3. Traditional public interest lawyering is called regnant lawyering by Gerald Lopez,
as opposed to rebellious lawyering which seeks to empower subordinated clients. Gerald
Lopez, Reconceiving Civil Rights Practice: Seven Weeks in the Life of a Rebellious Collabo-
ration, 77 GEO. L.J. 1603, 1609-1610 (1989). This regnant lawyering is criticized as well-
intentioned individual and even class-wide problem solving by liberal and progressive lawyers
in offices isolated from organizational activity like community organization, community edu-
cation, self-help campaigns, and other forms of grass roots mobilization. Id.
Lopez goes further in Training Future Lawyers to Work with the Politically and Socially
Subordinated: Anti-Generic Education, 91 W. VA. L. REV. 305, 358-386 (1989). He indicates
one of the reasons why lawyering for empowerment or rebellious lawyering is not prevalent
is that even [t]hough millions in this country live in social and political subordination and
though lawyers have worked to help challenge these conditions, law schools only rarely have
understood their job to include designing a training regimen responsive to this situation and
this task. Id. at 306. Lopez takes up this task and proposes a curriculum for legal education
and training of students to work with, and for, the poor and powerless. Id. at 376-78.
Finally, in REBELIous LAWYERING: ONE CHICANO'S VISION OF A PRooREssIVE LAW
PRACTICE (1992), Lopez illustrates the potentials and pitfalls inherent in lawyering with sketches
of struggles faced by those who take both law and justice seriously.
See also Louise G. Trubek, Critical Lawyering: Toward a New Public Interest Practice,
1 B.U. PuB. INT. L.J. 49 (1991) and Ruth Buchanan & Louise G. Trubek, Resistances and
Possibilities: A Critical and Practical Look at Public Interest Lawyering, 19 N.Y.U. REV. L.
& Soc. CHANGE 687 (1992).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/onulr21&div=25&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Reflections of Community Organizers: Lawyering for Empowerment of Community Organizations
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