Rebellious Strains in Transactional Lawyering for Underserved Entrepreneurs and Community Groups
Clinical Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2016
Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 412
29 Pages Posted: 22 Aug 2016 Last revised: 4 Dec 2018
Date Written: August 22, 2016
Abstract
In his 1992 book Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice, Gerald López disrupted the conventional understandings of what it meant to be an effective poverty lawyer or public interest attorney. His critiques and prescriptions were aimed at litigators and lawyers similarly engaged in struggles for social change. His book did not address the role of progressive transactional lawyers. Today, transactional lawyers working in underserved communities are far more common. This Essay seeks to apply López’s critiques to the work of those practitioners.
I argue here that transactional legal services, or TLS, on behalf of subordinated clients achieves many of the aims of the Rebellious Lawyering project. I separate TLS on behalf of individual entrepreneurs from a more collective TLS on behalf of community or worker groups. For practitioners working with entrepreneurs, the Essay observes that client power, control, and autonomy are more readily achieved, albeit through what López might describe as quite regnant practices. Those practices, I argue, are fully justified in this context. What TLS for entrepreneurs does not accomplish, though, is community mobilization, a downside that is regrettable but not a reason to eschew that kind of work. Collective TLS provides all of the upsides of entrepreneurial TLS while not sacrificing mobilization goals. That version of TLS, though, does present two of its own challenges, one triggered by the complexity and sophistication of the legal issues involved in may community economic development projects, and the second resulting from the nature of group representation.
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