Professor Ascanio Piomelli of the UC Hastings College of Law has posted a new paper entitled “The Challenge of Democratic Lawyering” on SSRN. The abstract is as follows:
This essay, written for the Fordham Law Review's symposium on The Lawyer's Role in a Contemporary Democracy, argues that a diverse movement of social-change lawyering that has emerged over the past two decades is united by a commitment to fostering robust democratic participation in collective action by low-income and working-class people and people of color. The essay describes the democratic vision that unites these lawyers, with its focus on enhancing ordinary citizens' abilities to act in concert with others in self-government broadly construed. This vision challenges the long-prevailing, thinner conception, which limits democracy to a political process that provides a say in selecting one's representatives and an incentive structure to encourage representatives to act wisely. This essay argues that these democratic lawyers and their partners challenge deep-seated individualistic, aristocratic, and formalistic cultural predispositions in the United States and its legal profession. These prevailing - but contested - predispositions relate to: what democracy means and how we practice it; how we understand individuals and groups, intelligence and expertise; and the relative importance we place on formal rights or on the power of people and groups to change their living conditions.
In a series of articles over the past decade, Piomelli has analyzed and interpreted writings from the 1980s and 1990s from legal scholars who deeply and critically explored the professional role and practices of lawyers for low-income clients and those from subordinated communities. The result is an emerging affirmative vision of what law practice can be on behalf of such individuals and communities. Piomelli’s work is not likely to be of interest to those primarily concerned with legal ethics issues in corporate law practice or with the content of professional responsibility rules and codes. However, for any who work with moderate or low-income clients, perform pro bono legal services, or are simply interested in how lawyers might help the numerous victims of the current financial meltdown, Piomelli’s vision is worth exploring.