How does law matter for social justice and equality? What impacts do lawyers working on behalf of and alongside low-income workers have on social movements? Robust debates among law-and-society scholars have attempted to answer these questions as they investigated the legacies of the civil rights movement. Why, for example, despite legal wins like Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, have racialized economic inequality and subordination persisted in the United States?Footnote ¹ Some scholars focused on the efficacy, or inefficacy, of litigation in relationship to social movements (McCann Reference McCann1992; Keck Reference Keck2009). They looked at judicial action on behalf of disadvantaged groups and found several limitations (Scheingold Reference Scheingold1974; Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg2008). An adjacent debate focused not on litigation but, instead, on the specific role of lawyers in social movements (Bell Reference Bell1976; Sarat and Scheingold Reference Sarat and Scheingold2006). In his over two decades of scholarship, Scott Cummings has entered both conversations and pushed those of us who take up these questions to sharpen our theoretical analysis (Cummings and Eagly Reference Cummings and Eagly2001; Cummings Reference Cummings2013, Reference Cummings2018). Bringing together these inquiries for a new generation of lawyers and social movement actors, Cumming’s work has helped theorize what law and those who specialize in the law in the neoliberal era do for, and in fights for, economic justice.

In An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles, Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) has brought together a decade of qualitative research examining five campaigns in the city of Los Angeles. These stories begin where the canonical accounts of legal scholars from a previous generation ended. They investigate the role of a generation of lawyers, many of them trained in the 1990s and 2000s, who center economic rights and reject the centrality of the courts in their fights to redistribute economic power. Through textual analysis, interviews, and litigation review, Cummings painstakingly documents the nuanced and long-term relationships among lawyers, immigrant rights organizers, labor organizers, and city government in the context of movement campaigns. In doing this, he is driven by a commitment to rigorous empiricism and theoretical framing as a scholar, but, perhaps more importantly, he is also driven by a commitment to social justice.

Cummings uses comparative institutional analysis—a form of investigation that looks not just at legal mobilization but also at its alternatives—to push critics of legal liberalism to reimagine the role of law in their analysis. His goal is not to debunk these critics. Rather, he argues that the contention of scholars (including me) that rights-based legal mobilization reinforces the legitimacy of liberal individualization unfairly places the blame for this deradicalization on the law, lawyers, and their legal strategies. Through his case studies, Cummings shows that law and lawyers are irreplaceable in bending policy—governmental and non-governmental—in progressive directions.

To scholars who have argued that the language of the law and individual rights tends to co-opt a movement’s transformative ambition and obscure structural barriers to equality, Cummings’s book makes three critically important points. First, he shows how, if we decenter litigation in our analysis, we can then more clearly see the important role of lawyers in other forms of movement advocacy. While litigation remains central to social movements, so too is the important role of lawyers in private and public negotiation, as demonstrated by the community benefits agreements and the fight for local ordinances and initiatives that his case studies highlight. Second, by highlighting the framing choices of these campaigns, he demonstrates that, even when movements avoid or eschew legal language and litigation tactics, they tend to submerge radical messaging in an attempt to build larger and more inclusive coalitions. In other words, non-litigation challenges to power have some of the same problems that critics of legal liberalism have squarely put on the shoulders of lawyers and litigation. Third, Cummings successfully pushes critical legal scholars to understand that law is not necessarily a top-down process; rather, lawyers shape the role that they play and that the law plays in social movements. For example, while public interest lawyers are liaisons between communities and state actors, Cummings found that they often go to great lengths to ensure that the information and stories they share with political decision makers are informed by community knowledge. In almost all of Cummings’s case studies, lawyers—many of them influenced by the critical legal scholars of an earlier generation—worked to democratize the process of creating and leveraging legal meaning and legal decision making.

These three central insights that Cummings draws from the careful empirical work in this book allow us to analyze the role of law in movement success much more broadly. In these case studies, litigation played a central role in the campaigns for progressive reform, but it does so in ways that break from conventional analysis. Litigation challenging the independent contractor classification of Los Angeles’s port truckers, for example, was not in any way viewed or understood as a solution to the problem of low-wage work. It was, in the eyes of movement actors, including the lawyers themselves, one piece of a larger puzzle in which interdisciplinary strategies for growing worker power was centered.

Because Cummings focuses on long-term case studies, he also calls for a restructuring of how scholars of law and social movements measure movement success. This book’s striking case studies call upon movement scholars to look not just at the substantive outcomes of movement mobilization—are workers empowered economically and politically in a sustainable long-term sense—but also at broader social change cycles. What may be traditionally understood as a movement failure in a particular moment could be reframed as part of a long arc of monumental struggle, full of lessons for future political actions. Even what seems like a failure on its face can itself be a movement opportunity: an incremental step in a cycle that necessarily shapes the next direction of organizing. In this sense, a crucial insight of this book is that, under the neoliberal capitalist system, there are no substantive, durable wins, only substantive sustained struggle.

Indeed, Cummings sagely warns us against the dichotomy traps that have hampered much scholarly literature on law and social movements. He demonstrates that not only is the line between “success” and “failure” much blurrier than scholars have conceded but so too is the distinction between legal and non-legal strategies in these social movements. He also argues that the roles of lawyers as leaders, as movement participants, and as people impacted by social injustice cannot be theorized as necessarily positive or negative. It is constantly shifting. This brings me to a central debate in the labor movement, which Cummings alludes to throughout An Equal Place. It is a debate that I, as a scholar and movement lawyer, confront on a near daily basis: should labor movements focus on producing and creating political opportunities through organizing, or should they legislate and litigate to facilitate organizing and power. I will call this the law-or-organizing debate. Should the Teamsters and Communication Workers of America in the port trucking case study, for example, have pushed to organize the truckers, using direct actions and sheer worker power to change the political, economic, and social landscape of Los Angeles ports? Or were they right to work on litigation and regulation to achieve employee conversion, even though that effort ended up being invalidated by an industry preemption lawsuit? Cummings emphasizes that the outcomes of either strategy could not have been predicted. We still do not know what wide-scale organizing and direct actions might have created in the port trucking campaign, including potential criminal liability for low-income immigrant truckers.

Indeed, Cummings maintains that we cannot fully theorize the role of law and elite movement actors like lawyers without attending to the ways in which these actors are constrained by a system of constant, powerful industry countermobilization. With the extraordinary concentration of capital through venture-backed business models in just the last decade, the legal and political ecosystems that social movement actors operate within are quite different than they once were—even, I might argue, than they were during the era covered by this book. This, Cummings emphasizes, deserves equal analysis when trying to understand the role of law in social movements. For example, while unions might hold back on aggressive organizing in industries that are constituted by putative independent contractor workers because of the potential antitrust liabilities involved, large employers can very easily bear the risk of misclassification and engage in a game of legal whack-a-mole with the unions. In fact, that is what Cumming’s analyses of the Los Angeles port truckers campaign and the anti-sweatshop campaign case studies reveal. Industry, in both instances, went beyond the law’s boundaries to create their own private system of governance. But without the same political and economic resources, social movement actors had to respond within legal boundaries or face immobilizing consequences.

These issues and questions have haunted me as a scholar and advocate. Ten years ago, Cummings and Ingrid Eagly’s (2001) article “A Critical Reflection on Law and Organizing” helped me make sense of my PhD data on taxi worker organizing in San Francisco. Sorting through archives, I was astonished to discover that my previous experiences as a public interest lawyer representing taxi workers were similar to the experiences of public interest lawyers since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Lawyers decades before me had approached low-wage taxi worker communities across the country and attempted to address their misclassification as independent contractors, which they (and I) understood to be the root of their precarity. What I found in both practice and my research was that these efforts had largely fallen flat. Even when workers had won in courts, they lost over time. Either taxi companies refused to bargain with them (if they had won the right to unionize), and, eventually, the workers left the industry, or the companies had used the court decisions—won after many years of litigation—to change their business model to make it seem like the workers were more like independent contractors (Dubal Reference Dubal2017). In these cases, workers were often worse off than before the litigation.

In the first few articles I published after I completed my dissertation research, I grappled with this and with the rise of the so-called “gig work” or digitally allocated service work that purported to use independent contractor labor. Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) and Eagly’s (2001) empirical findings that workers’ rights lawyers were increasingly engaging in organizing—or community-based practices—and not just litigation, pushed me to ask what lessons previous iterations of misclassification might have for lawyers opposing these new forms of exploitation. At the time, my conclusion was that public interest lawyers in this space needed to move beyond litigating the fraught employee-independent contractor binary. Workers, I argued, were compelled by the law and by lawyers to focus their energies on capturing a legal identity with a constantly moving line that detracted from the larger fight: growing power. What if, I asked, lawyers ignored the fight for employment status and instead supported worker organizing and direct actions? In this moment, I, like many legal scholars before me, came to understand rights-based legal mobilization as reinforcing the legitimacy of liberal individualization and undermining collective power.

But, influenced by Cummings, my empirical research followed a long arc and extended well beyond this early moment. This long-term observation and analysis of the role of law—and the legal fight for employment status—forced me to change my mind about the role of law—and even litigation—in the fight against misclassification. Cummings published An Equal Place just as world-historic battles about misclassification among capital, regulators (both legislative and enforcement officers), and workers were playing out in California. Like the port truckers in Cummings’s case study, misclassified logistics workers across the state were being denied access to the minimum wage, overtime, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize and collectively form a union. In response to this growing phenomenon, the California Supreme Court issued a 2018 decision called Dynamex v. Superior Court of Los Angeles.Footnote ² Dynamex involved the misclassification of offline delivery workers, and it created a legal presumption of employment status for wage purposes and instituted the ABC test to determine if a worker was correctly classified as an independent contractor. Among other factors, the ABC test included an analysis of whether a worker was engaged in work that was outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business. If the answer was no, then the worker was not an independent contractor but an employee. This meant that because an Uber driver was doing work (ride-hail) that was part of the usual course of Uber’s business (also, ride-hail), that driver was likely an employee of Uber.

Dynamex became a political opportunity for workers across the ride-hail and food delivery sectors. Ride-hail workers organizing together for better conditions quickly switched gears from fighting for a legislative “bill of rights” to fighting for employment status. “It turned out,” one driver from a self-organizing group of workers called Rideshare Drivers United told me, “that everything on our bill of rights translated into employment rights. So that’s what we decided to fight for” (Dubal Reference Dubal and Acevedo2020). While labor platform companies scrambled to create a legislative carve out from Dynamex for themselves, ride-hail and food delivery workers stood behind and fought to pass a piece of legislation—referred to as California Assembly Bill 5 or, more simply, AB5—which was introduced by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez. AB5 codified and extended the decision in Dynamex, creating a legal presumption of employment for all California employment laws and implementing the ABC test for all these laws. Gonzalez, a former Teamster, understood both misclassification and the political tactics of trucking and taxi companies in maintaining their workers as independent contractors.

The successful passage of AB5 was not the result of lawyers leading workers or co-opting their movements. My research found that, in this instance, it was workers who pivoted to legislation and, eventually, to litigation as the best avenues to achieve collective rights. Employment status itself was used as organizing leverage to create the possibility of collective power. During their campaign to pass AB5, Rideshare Drivers United grew their membership to over twenty thousand workers and organized the first global strike against Uber and Lyft. Even after AB5 was won but not enforced, Rideshare Drivers United organized a collective wage claim campaign—a creative direct action against the companies that forced state action. Working with legal aid attorneys, they created an online tool that enabled thousands of workers to file individual wage claims with the Labor Commissioner’s office, successfully pushing the state to initiate a field investigation and forcing the California attorney general’s office to file a first-of-its-kind lawsuit alleging the misclassification of these workers.

The passage of AB5, however, did not produce substantive positive change for these workers. The following year, amid the COVID-19 lockdowns, Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and Instacart sponsored the most expensive referendum in US history and passed Proposition 22. These companies succeeded in exempting themselves from AB5 and creating the first third-category worker law in the United States. Ride-hail and food delivery workers laboring for these companies were no longer legally employees, nor were they independent contractors who (in theory) could negotiate their own contracts. Instead, they were relegated to a new set of laws that solidified the companies’ business models (Dubal Reference Dubal2022). In the following year, workers reported that their earnings decreased (McCullough et al. Reference McCullough, Dolber, Scoggins, Muña and Treuhaft2022), and few had access to the supposed “benefits” that the companies proffered under Proposition 22 (McCullough and Dolber Reference McCullough and Dolber2021). This outcome again begged the question: was the law and the use of lawyers in this fight a distraction from the greater goal to organize and grow collective power? Based on my ethnographic, long-term study of this fight, my answer is unequivocally no.

Taking what Cummings teaches us in this book and applying it to this case study, I came to a powerful conclusion, which was different than the one that I had come to in my early research: although workers lost Proposition 22, the legal claims to employment status—specifically, the claim to push for the ABC test and to pass AB5—were ultimately what facilitated the expansive worker politicization and organizing that took place. The fact that workers had a concrete, achievable goal—a claim to the state for basic economic rights—is what helped self-organizing drivers to build interpersonal relationships and power and created an environment in which possibilities for change remain. Again, the critical insight from Cummings’s case studies struck me: under the neoliberal capitalist system, there is no substantive, long-term wins, only substantive sustained struggle.

An Equal Place treads a fine line in both countering critiques of legal liberalism that suggest we should disavow the role of lawyers in social movements and exalting those lawyers. Cummings takes great care to investigate and think about the subjectivity of the lawyers themselves and what shaped them and their decision making. This care underscores the importance of critique and self-critique in movement lawyering. Lawyering style matters. Cummings (Reference Cummings2021, 478) calls for “a renovated theory of lawyer accountability and legal efficacy in support of movements for progressive reform.” The lawyers that he researches, like the lawyers in my own research, have symbiotic relationships to social movements because they constantly hold themselves accountable to the workers whose movements they supported. They are students of critical race theory and rebellious lawyering, and this teaching profoundly shapes their representational choices and politics. They promote community monitoring of their own work, intertwining what perhaps they learned from radical clinical pedagogy to emphasize the need for community empowerment.

What does An Equal Place teach us about what it looks like and means to emphasize community empowerment in social justice lawyering? Cummings conceptualizes lawyer accountability as a democratization process—a movement of checks and balances that rein in ill-conceived legal strategies. In keeping with his call to offer guidance on how lawyers should act in large-scale campaigns, I want to think through what might inform those checks and balances. What I learned from his case studies is that community empowerment must always be central to the envisioned outcome of a legal or political movement strategy. That sounds like a cliché, but it is an important question and exercise for movement lawyers. I will again take an example from my own research. Labor lawyers since roughly 2016 have attempted to draft state collective bargaining laws for Uber and Lyft drivers, attempting to create horizontal equity in a labor law system that, to date, has been about the exertion of vertical legal power.

In Washington state, one such law passed. But the problem, as the workers themselves emphasized, was that it traded the possibility of a democratic union for a worker association with very little power. As one worker wrote, “[t]his bill threatens to undermine preexisting labor frameworks for part-time, software-dispatched, unionized employment that are currently serving workers like me well in other industries” (Laundry Reference Laundry2022, n.p.). The Teamsters’ local endorsement of this law, which was opposed by the recently elected head of the Teamsters International, is an example of movement leaders not being held accountable to their membership. In sharp contrast, similar legislation in New York, Connecticut, and California was thrown out in response to organized groups of workers holding lawyers, legislators, and union leaders accountable to their interests.

In thinking further about community empowerment lawyering, I want to highlight an important thread that I see in all of Cummings’s case studies that really is unique to the political ecosystem in Los Angeles during the period that he writes about. Unlike labor organizing almost anywhere else in the country during this time, what is so striking about these case studies—and a lesson that I hope readers take away from the book—is the importance of cross-movement solidarity. What the garment workers, grocery workers, day laborers, retail workers, and truck drivers case studies all shared was a commitment to thinking about labor in the context of racial and even environmental justice. What may not be obvious is that this was not in any way an inevitable outcome. Taking radical lessons from the Rodney King uprisings, worker centers and unions made the concerted decision to build interracial movement solidarity alongside traditional unionism, transforming what labor movement looks like in the city. These campaigns, even when they were torn asunder by industry, built interpersonal, intercommunity, and inter-movement possibilities that continue to be nothing but a fantasy in many places in this country.

In this sense, An Equal Place is not only one of the most important books on lawyering in social movements but also may very well be the most important subaltern history of modern Los Angeles. And I hope that those who are interested not just in worker movements or public interest lawyering, but also scholars of urban transformation in sociology, geography, and anthropology, take note of this and learn from Cummings’s deep empirical and theoretical engagement with law, work, place, and justice. I certainly have.