Thread by @TheSituationist

🧵 1/ - VERY LONG THREAD ON IMPEDIMENTS TO ACTIVISM AND ORGANIZING AMONG LAW STUDENTS AND LAWYERS:
15 years ago, law students perceived the law as legitimate. Today, I'd say they're “all crits now.” #AllCritsNow 👇

2/ That is, many law students (and lawyers and law professors) today arrive as 1Ls with the strong presumption that our laws are deeply unjust. Specifically, that laws are . . .

3/ a product of competition among interests, not internally determinate or pre-ordained by some transcendent or normatively purifying authority, value, or process, such as god, nature, precedent, principle, efficiency, history, meaning, legal reasoning, or the rule of law;...

4/ political, distributional, and rigged – both a cause and consequence of power, not the product or source of justice or some other deep norm; ...

5/ designed generally to blame the victims of power and absolve and reward the powerful for the unequal consequences of the systemically rigged system and group-based distributional dynamics that it facilitates; and ...

6/ designed to further conceal its inequality-reproducing harms and political biases behind mystifying complexities, which themselves advantage those who can afford an attorney and all but guarantee the success of those who can afford a team of “elite lawyers”;

7/ indeed, there is a widely held sense that laws and the legal system have been a source of injustice-unfairly disadvantaging some groups-depriving them of resources, power, freedom, and status-while unfairly advantaging other groups.

8/ If I'm right about all of that (and I might not be) then that raises a question: why aren’t those law students and law people eagerly and aggressively engaging in activism and organizing to expose, resist, and change the system in which they are participating?

9/ Why no widespread, national organizing and power-building through solidarity and resistance, and why no groundswell of political resistance to dominant systems by coalitions of lawyers working to call out publicly the plain truth about the injustice of our legal system?

10/ What prevents thousands of the country’s 113K law students (or 1.3 million lawyers) from banning together to call out and challenge the law's role in producing deep systemic injustices? Why, to quote @dereckapurnell is student organizing so weak.”

https://twitter.com/TheSituationist/status/1573768762511204352

11/ Below I’ve collected a bunch of potential partial explanations that come to mind. It’s an interesting and important exercise, in my view, because identifying and understanding impediments to collective action, is key to overcoming them.

12/ For those of you who have the stamina I’d love to learn what you think regarding the significance of these factors or others that I’ve overlooked.

Ok, here goes. There is . . .

13/ a lack of appreciation for the critical role played by organizing and movements means of building power and advancing change;

14/ a lack of knowledge that organizations, efforts, and opportunities for justice-centered lawyers already exist (e.g., @justice_init, @NLGnews, @PeoplesParity);

15/ *pluralistic ignorance* regarding other law people’s attitudes – each law person assumes that other law people are more sanguine about the legal system than they actually are.
psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-21….

16/ yet to be a “tipping point” crisis when a large group of "silent majority" law people finally becomes outraged and eager to push for “wide-scale social change.”
apa.org/news/podcasts/…

17/ a presumption that the solution to the unjust system should be individualistic or exclusively local--that law people’s energies should be directed at individual clients or toward community-based movements not toward larger collective movement.

18/ the taming effect of economic dependence on system-affirming institutions and their clients or benefactors-reluctance to challenge the system upon which their livelihoods depend?

https://twitter.com/tbh4justice/status/1548706264489676801

19/ or social-status dependence–that law people, individually and collectively, have constructed identities and social capital upon a system, the de-legitimation of which threatens their social status and privilege.

20/ the pacifying role of existential and moral dissonance that leads law people to deny our own role in advancing injustice–in the form of, for example, caging, violence, and death, extreme inequalities, democratic dysfunction, and environmental catastrophes.

21/ a collective action problem–in the absence of a robust movement, law people lack an obvious path to solidarity, organization, and strength in numbers that might insulate them from the selective punishment and alienation that would likely result from individual resistance.

22/ overcommitment, obligation fatigue–we are simply too busy with, or exhausted by, personal and career demands to add anything else to our schedules?
see

https://twitter.com/TheSituationist/status/1573768762511204352

23/ too many trivial distractions – e.g., too much time writing and reading twitter threads to meaningfully engage, while believing ourselves to be making a difference and becoming desensitized to the injustices.

24/ institutional, professional incentives – e.g., the need for lawyers acting within legal institutions to prioritize their individual clients and, thus, to maintain their system-legitimizing performances to better serve those clients (or to maintain any professional capital).

25/ professional rules of ethics that might further chill or prohibit outspoken systemic criticisms of the law and legal system.

26/ Social-belonging – the fear of standing out, creating discomfort or disharmony, being ostracized by colleagues, friends, and family or easily labeled and dismissed by others.

27/ Individualistic – law students/lawyers (through self-selection and socialization) tend to be too self-oriented, independent, risk-averse, or debt-ridden to embrace a collective consciousness and participate actively in agitation and collective action.

28/ Socialized norms and values – students/lawyers specifically trained, for instance, to embrace lifestyles and status metrics of affluence, to “reproduce hierarchy,” and to internalize the system-affirming “cult of collegiality.”

https://twitter.com/TheSituationist/status/1542567940586881024

29/ Enculturated ideologies – law students socialized to favor efficiency over equality, selfishness over altruism, and so on.

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc….

30/ Genuine (or feigned) humility: recognition (or rationalization) that their privilege and limited understanding of the experience and causes of injustice leaves them ill equipped to engage actively in promoting change, lest they do more harm than good.

31/ An implicit contract – a (mostly) unwritten code of silence, a tacit agreement backed by discipline and rewards, to protect legal system, professional and class interests, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other intersecting vectors of oppression

https://twitter.com/TheSituationist/status/1544728095969710082

32/ Elite capture:

https://twitter.com/TheSituationist/status/1544728127984762881

33/ A failure of imagination or a lack of inspiring, alternative visions of what our world might look like or a clear theory of change for getting there.

34/ hopelessness or sense of inefficacy: demobilized by the belief that change is impossible, resistance is futile, or worse – producing no benefits only costs and backlash for those who participate.
smith.edu/sites/default/…

35/ distrustful, and fractured left – an expectation that, despite shared starting points – intergroup or interpersonal differences, disagreements, or disputes eclipse that common ground, making enemies of potential allies.

36/ nested injustice: the dispiriting expectations that collective resistance inevitably (re)produces its own ugly internal power dynamics and hierarchies-replicating the very problems that motivating the movement in the first place.

37/ dependence on, and competition for, support from system-affirming funders – leading to distrust, or jealousy on the left over funding, attention, credit, and power
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/w…

38/ splintering disagreements regarding goals, theories of change, strategies, tactics, methods, values, personnel, and so on.

39/ division and difficult decisions in change-advancing movements regarding how inclusive, systemic, and radical the collective demands and goals should be, over, for example, where the line is for accepting incremental improvements to the detriment of deeper, holistic change?

40/ energy- and good-will depleting divisions and debates over what the processes of decision making and dispute resolution – divisions that often have implications for the group’s efficacy, efficiency, hierarchy, and sense of cohesion.

41/ taxing intergroup and interpersonal tensions and conflicts that often occurs especially in such against-the-grain efforts and lead to scarring breakups, owing to resentments, jealousies, misunderstandings, and disillusionment.

42/ fear that efforts to challenge the system might actually succeed in producing a revolution and, in turn, lead to some imagined state of volatile, violent, brutalizing “lawlessness”?

43/ What else?

44/ 44 In my view, we’re on the cusp of a major shift in power and policy one way or the other. It behooves those of us committed to justice to consider the many challenges and costs the work of organizing entails and to try to build institutions and coalitions accordingly.