Legal Education: Nemesis or Ally of Social Movements?

Abstract

There is much in legal education which contributes to lawyering practices that are fundamentally at odds with the formation of social movements. These practices include the "individualization" of client problems; the reshaping of the realities of clients' lives into legal categories or boxes; the commitment to instrumentalism (that is, to securing a favourable legal result); and lawyer domination and control and the correlates of client silence and passivity. The genesis for these features of dominant lawyering practices can be traced, at least in part, to legal education. More specifically, legal education's emphasis upon doctrinal analysis, its tendency to trade upon an existing stock of legal categories or stories, and the relative inattention paid to fundamental critiques of the status quo contribute to these lawyering practices.