Chasing the Wind: Pursuing Social Justice, Overcoming Legal Mis-Education, and Engaging in Professional Re-Socialization

jurisprudence, but, rather, as serious work to transform the lives of marginalized, subordinated, and underrepresented people. Iris Young views social justice as deriving from "the institutional conditions for promoting self-development and selfdetermination of a society's members. 27 While there is no one vision of social justice, I would add that it promotes the collective self-development and self-determination for many of our communities that experience oppression, exploitation, exclusion, and the denial of human dignity. For the New World Foundation ("NWF"), the task is to build social movements that shift the balance of power toward democracy and justice.28 I believe that social justice addresses both the issues of identity politics and of the political economy. Yet, however we address group rights and subordination, we must always keep our eyes on the prize of improving material conditions, dismantling structural inequality, disrupting systemic oppressions, and redistributing wealth. We must create more egalitarian institutions and we must erode illegitimately held privilege. We must stop considering today and tomorrow as the same time. I think that Judith Shklar is absolutely correct that only by understanding the face of injustice can we understand its counterpart, justice.29 As I reflect on my professional life over the last 30 yearsas Legal Services attorney, law professor and legal scholar, program officer at the Ford Foundation-I think that social justice work must primarily alter the opportunity-denying circumstances, systems, and structures of oppression and inequality. Thus redress will go beyond justice in general or basic rights claims. It will evoke substantive rather than merely formal equality. It will go beyond merely issues of just distribution and issues of allocation, however important they 27. IRIS MARION YOUNG, INCLUSION AND DEMOCRACY 33 (2000). 28. See infra notes 125-27 and accompanying text. 29. See JUDITH N. SHKLAR, THE FACES OF INJUSTICE 15-16 (1990). LOYOLA OF LOS ANGELES LA WREVIEW [Vol. 37:1167 may be. It is important to think of "social justice" as "simultaneously distributional and relational. 3 ° As I think about injustice and fight for social justice I am most worried about those who are nakedly oppressed, who are at risk of living out their lives as "static, limited, and expendable., 31 Beyond exploiting people, our nation is writing people off with no more concern than the tax accountant writes off a business loss. Ira Goldenberg argues that under these circumstances, the oppressed person and society may be spatially connected but psychologically separate, living in worlds that are parallel but not reciprocal: 32 Oppression, in short, is a condition of being in which one's past and future meet in the present-and go no further. To be oppressed is to be rendered obsolete almost from the moment of birth, so that one's experience of oneself is always contingent on an awareness of just how poorly one approximates the images that currently dominate society.33 We must intervene to alter these circumstances of containment and expendability. The social justice plate is full and the tent is big. Hence we must, as Mari Matsuda teaches, keep our eyes open to opportunities to activate coalition building, collaboration initiatives, and inclusion strategies.34 Matsuda explains: The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call "ask the other 30. According to David Smith, The term social justice is taken to embrace both fairness and equity in the distribution of a wide range of attributes, which need not be confined to material things. Although the primary focus is on attributes which have an immediate bearing on people's lives, our conception of social justice goes beyond patterns of distribution, general and spatial, to incorporate attributes relevant to how these come about. While fairness is sometimes applied to procedures and justice to outcomes, we are concerned with both. Preference for the term social justice rather than justice in general is explained not by preoccupation with the distribution of attributes which might be labeled as social, but by concern with something which happens socially, among people in a society. DAVID SMITH, GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 26 (1994). 31. IRA GOLDENBERG, OPPRESSION AND SOCIAL INTERVENTION 2 (1978). 32. Id. 33. Id. 34. Mari J. Matsuda, Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition, 43 STAN. L. REV. 1183 (1991). 1176 PURSUING SOCIAL JUSTICE question." When I see something that looks racist, I ask, "Where is the patriarchy in this?" When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, "Where is the heterosexism in this?" When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, "Where are the class interests in this?" Working in coalition forces us to look for both the obvious and nonobvious relationships of domination, helping us to realize that no form of subordination ever stands alone. If this is true,. . . then isn't it also true that dismantling any one form of subordination is impossible without dismantling every other?35 III. PROFESSIONAL SOCIALIZATION AS A CONSTRAINT ON SOCIAL