Movement Lawyering for Alternative Futures
By: Zahra Stardust
Tags: Social Movements, Resistance, Activism, Tech, Law

Movement Lawyering for Alternative Futures

By Zahra Stardust, Roslyn M. Satchel, Afsaneh Rigot, Kendra Albert and Micaela Mantegna

Ten years ago, trans activist, writer and teacher Dean Spade published a piece for those considering law, setting out ‘what every activist should know before going to law school.’

In the article, Spade discusses the complicated relationship between law and social movements (including how law is used to maintain rather than undo systems) and asks what role can lawyers play in social movements, through demystifying the law to resist indoctrination and by linking legal service provision to transformative change strategies.

Inspired by this piece, 5 lawyers, ex-lawyers and legal practitioners from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society speak about their vexed relationship to the law, tensions in their practice, their strategies and tactics, and the kinds of futures they are trying to build.

Media, Law, Ethics, & Social Movements

Principles of justice, equity, mutual aid, and self-determination animate my work.

Law is content for courses I teach, as well as organizing and policy advocacy I do in communities. I teach that the law can be helpful as both a guide for protecting the vulnerable and for challenging unethical practices/laws. Simultaneously, however, I often use history to reality-test slippery slope harms created by laws that are inconsistent, cause confusion or lack predictability — particularly in relation to race, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, language, socio-economic status, or other caste markers.

The relationship between law and social justice movements is one of tension and boundary challenging. The law could be an instrument to help people live in security and dignity, but instead those in power use it to entrench and fortify their power via status quo. These competing interests require juxtaposition to avoid dominant group tyranny. Those pushed to the margins must exert pressure by all necessary means. For 20 years, I’ve pushed back.

Sometimes law is not the answer; it’s the problem.

Sometimes law is not the answer; it’s the problem. The difficulty I often see arises when law enables/permits money and power to corrupt movements. The non-profit industrial complex has a political economy that retains power with elite gatekeepers through funding grants. These foundations broker grants to address certain social problems but rarely change social conditions or the law. As a result, Non-Government Organisations/Community-Based Organisations compete for grants (scraps) — often abandoning the mission or programming for the preferences of grantors — in order to make payroll or provide healthcare benefits for staff. Meanwhile, the government either fails to act or enacts laws that tie activists’ hands (e.g., U.S. Patriot Act). Currently, this divisive dynamic is at work in popular social movements, and we must question whether splintering is the purpose; and if so, who benefits?

Having experienced these problems professionally as a non-profit executive (as well as hating disempowering adversarial courtroom practices), I opt for alternative uses of my legal skills that shift power by prioritizing research and interventions with practical benefits to marginalized communities. I am trying to build a future where children of the African diaspora have futures as bright as (or even brighter than) they did before colonization and enslavement.

Resistance and the Power of the People

I never wanted to study law. It wasn’t for us. Coming from Iran, moving to the UK as a refugee and living in the UK in a struggling working-class family (in a predominately immigrant BIPOC town) l quickly realised, the law was not for us. The law was about us. It was for us to bypass and navigate and not fall into the traps of.

In Iran the law served as a tool for a theocratic dictatorship that surveilled, imprisoned, tortured and exiled its residents, our friends, my family. In the UK it was the structures that worked to keep people like us out — on the outskirts of borders or in the margins of society.

The law meant barriers to jobs, financial support and opportunities to exist. It meant the police, immigration control, access issues. The law meant: you’re not safe; this isn’t for you.

That changed as I grew. I didn’t know about Movement Lawyering per se — but came to admire those who I now know employed it: legal aid lawyers that helped us get status when all other hope was lost; the fearless lawyers in Iran who used their in-depth knowledge against the legal system itself; those I’d read about in books who used the law as a tool to contain its own power, to cripple the structures confining groups most oppressed, marginalised and targeted. Then I was intrigued. I wanted to learn how to wield the same tool for our communities.

My favourite movement lawyering quote is from Law for Black Lives: “It means building the power of the people, not the power of the law.”

I didn’t continue with traditional legal practice (I was working towards becoming an immigration and human rights barrister). These days, I use my access and knowledge to support communities in my region. I follow their leadership on how to build strategic movements and support their safety. I use the language of law to leverage power and hold companies accountable for harm. Most of the time the law itself isn’t useful, but my knowledge of how to navigate it is.

The law might not be for us, but we can do our best to stop it from being used against us.

The Limits of Law

I’ve always had a weird relationship to my role as a lawyer. I didn’t go to law school because I believed in the majesty or dignity of the law, but because I wanted software engineers to listen to me. Law felt like a way to accomplish that. And somehow, at the end of law school, people expected me to be a lawyer. Turns out a law degree isn’t just humanities finishing school, it’s a professional degree. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Fortunately, while I was in law school, my peers radicalized me. Specifically, Derecka Purnell, Kidist Keaton, and the other Black women who led the student protest movement at Harvard Law School called #Reclaim, radicalized me. I saw how lackluster the institutional response to racism was. I also saw how easy it was for White folks who the institution worked for (even self-professed liberal ones) to underestimate their own power to make change. At the same time, I was processing my own identity as a transgender person who wasn’t out (or even totally sure of their gender), and I could see all the ways in which law failed trans folks.

As I’ve gotten further into my legal career, I am more and more aware of the limits of law. As an attorney, I’ve embraced my role as a demystifer of legal systems (to use Dean Spade’s words). I’ve also been taught by friends and comrades, like Danielle Blunt of Hacking // Hustling, how to use the power that comes with institutional affiliations for rebellion.

As a teacher, I hope to help my students understand the limits of law as a tool. I support my students by building spaces for them in hierarchical institutions with unwritten rules, while challenging them via the material I teach to think bigger about systemic oppression, violence, and our duty as people to make change. Through my teaching, I aim to pass along, at least in part, the gift I was given by #Reclaim.

Ultimately, my legal work pales in comparison to the hard work of building movements and supporting communities. So now I play a small part in making the law less of a barrier to those who are making what John Lewis called “good trouble”, and I hope to train the next generation to push further and imagine more.

Law in 8-bits: Finding Joy and Creativity in the Legal Profession

My relationship with the law is ambivalent to say the least: I went to law school because I wanted to make a positive impact in the world, and becoming a judge seemed the proper way to do so. Spoiler alert! It was not.

Years as a Court clerk taught me a fair bit about how bureaucracy shapes organizations, preventing them from effective action and meaningful change. I come to the unsettling place of a non-conforming legal practitioner buried in one of the most archaic, formal and change-averse institutions: the judiciary. If you don’t fit, you must not acquit, but make room.

Law is a loose corpora of building blocks that interact to create solutions, a duality of limits and spaces for freedom. In that sense law is as much a tool as is code, and both could be equally inaccessible and esoteric for the uninitiated. Wide and open knowledge is crucial as a catalyst for change, that can be achieved by involving the communities affected by law’s frameworks before they are set in place.

Being lectures, podcasts or streamings, in divulgation and advocacy I found my call. And through pop culture and video games, the language to translate law and policy into something relatable and fun.

When presenting myself, I used to be in a “too many hats” conundrum: Should I speak as a policy researcher or from my place as a diversity activist through Women in Games Argentina? Videogames or artificial intelligence? Media or attorney?

Before, all these facets seemed antagonistic to being a legal professional. Now I settle on defining myself as the mind of a scholar, the heart of an activist and the skillset of a lawyer, trying to use all of them for good.

Through an unconventional journey I came to peace of mind with my purpose: trying to inspire the rogues and the misfits to embrace the whimsical weirdness of being different and to find our place in Law and its intersections: you are welcomed and you are needed here.

Sex, Law & Protest

When I was admitted to practice, I was advised by colleagues to disclose my sex work experience so the Legal Profession Admission Board could consider whether I was a ‘fit and proper person’ of ‘good fame and character’. Sex work is often seen as some kind of reputational risk. But in my view, sex work is a more dignified profession than law. And sex workers have plenty to offer in legal analysis, including robust critiques of criminalisation, licensing, border patrol, policing practices and the carceral state.

Law makes us preoccupied with incremental change and symbolic victories. My auto-ethnographic research on pornography taught me about the perils of reformism and my background as a policy advisor taught me that an ‘evidence-base’ will only get you so far before it is trumped by political expediency and self-interest.

In law reform, wins for some mean losses for others. And it is consistently the most marginalised who are left off the agenda with the promise that legislators will return for them ‘later’, a date that never arrives.

Where I live, on the unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, our government refuses to enter into a treaty with our Aboriginal and Torres Strait people, anti-protest legislation is on the rise and there is political backlash against trans youth. Yet the law maintains a delusion of progress.

My work has involved various strategies and interventions, from demystifying the law to legal accountability to strategic litigation. I’ve been a Legal Observer during protests for Black Lives Matter and Mardi Gras to document and record police brutality. I began the Illustrated Law Project, collaborating with tattoo artists to create accessible guides to police powers, protests and strip searching. I am working with Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association and the Inner City Legal Centre, to prepare a class action of sex workers against payment processors for financial discrimination.

As lawyers, we should be thinking about how we can use our skills to further social movements. Law speaks to itself in inaccessible jargon and maintains a profoundly unjust system of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability. The real legal experts are not lawyers or academics, but the communities who witness the brunt of its operation. I want to help build a future where marginalised communities drive social, cultural and economic change and eventually dismantle institutions of law as we know them.

For more on movement lawyering, see Law for Black Lives, the Movement Law Lab, the Movement Lawyering Conference, or watch this Spotlight on LGBTQ Advocacy in Lebanon as part of a series on Movement Lawyering and Social Change.