Cause Layers and Social Movements [Hardcover]

Cause Lawyers and Social Movementsseeks to reorient scholarship on cause lawyers, inviting scholars to think about cause lawyering from the perspective of those political activists with whom cause lawyers work and whom they seek to serve. It demonstrates that while all cause lawyering cuts against the grain of conventional understandings of legal practice and professionalism, social movement lawyering poses distinctively thorny problems.The editors and authors of this volume explore the following questions: What do cause lawyers do for, and to, social movements? How, when, and why do social movements turn to and use lawyers and legal strategies? Does their use of lawyers and legal strategies advance or constrain the achievement of their goals? And, how do movements shape the lawyers who serve them and how do lawyers shape the movements?This volume seeks to reorient scholarship on cause lawyers, inviting scholars to think about cause lawyering from the perspective of those political activists with whom cause lawyers work and whom they seek to serve. Together with their previous collaborative works on cause lawyers, Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold have taught us a great deal about the utility of lawyers and legal rights for social and political change, usefully highlighted the political significance of studying the practices of public interest lawyers in a politics of rights, and helped set an agenda for exciting and politically relevant research. Cause Lawyers and Social Movementspresents a rich range of case studies of the interaction between lawyering and social movement. Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor at Amherst College. Stuart A. Scheingold is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Washington. Together, Sarat and Scheingold are the authors ofSomething to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering