Scott L. Cummings is widely respected for his interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of community economic development (Cummings Reference Cummings2001, Reference Cummings2018a, Reference Cummings2018b), social movement history (Cummings Reference Cummings2017), public interest law (Chen and Cummings Reference Chen and Cummings2012), and the legal profession (Rhode et al. Reference Rhode, Luban, Cummings and Freeman Engstrom2020). A significant moment for both academics and activists alike, Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) new book, An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles, enriches the study of movement theory and practice by illuminating the role of lawyers in recent legal-political campaigns to challenge economic inequality in one of America’s most unequal and racially diverse cities. Chronicling a transformative period of Los Angeles history—roughly from the 1992 riots to the 2008 recession—Cummings examines what lawyers can achieve in the struggle to improve conditions for workers in the low-wage economy through legal mobilization and political engagement. For Cummings, the idea of an “equal place” expresses not only the goals of the economic justice movements but also an approach to movement lawyering in which lawyers and activists work together on an equal footing in local campaigns to overcome economic and racial division. This is the first book to center on the role of lawyers in contemporary movements for racial and economic justice and, as such, offers important insights into the potential of legal mobilization to transform economic and political systems in this unique moment of transformative change.
Against the backdrop of global outsourcing, declining unionism, increasing labor contingency, and surging immigration, Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) studies five pivotal Los Angeles-based campaigns in which lawyers, allied with the city’s labor, immigrant rights, and environmental movements, mobilized law to reform local and regional sectors of the political economy. The campaigns involved (1) the battle to end sweatshop production in the garment industry; (2) the coordinated litigation and organizing effort to challenge day laborer anti-solicitation ordinances; (3) the grassroots struggle to force private developers in gentrifying neighborhoods around downtown and the airport to enter community benefits agreements; (4) the fight to stop Wal-Mart from opening big-box stores in the Los Angeles area; and (5) the movement to redesign the trucking industry at the Port of Los Angeles. His in-depth studies reveal how law shaped and contested the structure of low-wage work in Los Angeles, and equally, how lawyers helped mold alternative models of multidimensional advocacy combining worker-centered legal mobilization and sector-specific regulatory reform. For Cummings, such alternative models shifted the focus of anti-poverty and civil rights work to advocating across institutional spaces, coordinating legal and extralegal tactics, planning for backlash, and building alliances to promote worker organizing and convert policy change into greater movement power. Rejecting the centrality of courts and reclaiming the centrality of economic rights, Cummings envisions lawyers deploying multidimensional methods of advocacy where law plays an important, albeit no longer decisive, part of a comprehensive strategy to change the legal framework of low-wage work in order to redistribute economic benefits, build worker power, and advance racial justice.
This review essay explores the relevance of An Equal Place to the practice of contemporary movement lawyering. Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) highlights the crucial yet often under-examined role of movement lawyers in law and social movement literature. The goal of this synthesis is to better understand the work of movement actors—lawyers and nonlawyers—in the lawmaking processes designed to reform local economic and political rules regulating work, economic development, housing, and environmental health in low-income communities of color.
The essay proceeds in three section. The first section examines lessons from Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) study of low-wage rights campaigns in Los Angeles to explore the ways in which lawyers operate behind the scenes as strategic partners enabling collective action and building power at the local level. Progressive lawyers are defining new paths to support and strengthen local movements that are reimagining and strengthening democracy from the ground up. The second section examines the structural constraints (fee generation and profit maximization) and professional norms (control and discretion) of Cummings’s theoretical framework for the legal-political mobilization campaigns conducted in partnership with for-profit law firms. Finally, the third section contemplates the five low-wage rights campaigns in Cummings’s studies within a broader historical context to hypothesize that a new wave of movement lawyers—transactional lawyers—are necessary to help sustain social movement organizations and further build their local power. In conclusion, the essay closes by summarizing the myriad ways in which Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021, 2) book outlines and exposes “the richness and complexity of contemporary” and future iterations of movement lawyering.
Lessons for current movement lawyers
Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) makes the refreshing suggestion that social movement literature may need to move beyond a number of dichotomies, including those between lawyers versus non-lawyers, litigation versus social mobilization, public law versus private law, and local versus national. This section explores five interrelated conclusions and recommendations for movement actors that emerge from Cummings exhaustive study. In briefly discussing each of these points, this section summarizes the recurring theme within Cummings’s studies for movement actors to embrace complexity.
Movement lawyers’ ethical stance
The lawyers who Cummings studies have succeeded in being ethically admirable movement lawyers because they have learned and embraced a value structure that emphasizes accountability to their clients and collaboration with movement actors. Due in part to a long period of reflective analysis (even breast beating, some might say), movement lawyers today are steeped in a literature that emphasizes the need for accountability and the dangers of failing to have this ethical stance. This literature points out the ease with which movement lawyers could avoid accountability due to the often fragile and nascent interests being represented in many movements. Cummings’s profiled movement lawyers are aware of these pitfalls and careful to avoid them. These lawyers manifest ethics that remain true to the values of accountability and solidarity with clients and movements despite the many opportunities that exist for movement lawyers not to adhere to such a moral stance.
Why were the lawyers who Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) studies so successful in remaining accountable to the movements they served? One reason was their backgrounds. Many were part of “a new generation of lawyers of color” who maintained “horizontal relations with the communities they served—and of which they viewed themselves a part of” (458). Several were from immigrant families, and some grew up in low-income communities. These shared identities, Cummings notes, can help movement lawyers appreciate and understand the contexts in which they are working (459–61). These movement lawyers “uplifted voices of community actors and validated other forms of community knowledge—while simultaneously asserting the equal value of their own contributions” (448). At the same time, Cummings is refreshingly clear and strong in advocating for a kind of soft perspectivism rather than any type of reductionist identity group politics. He takes pains to emphasize that lawyers who do not themselves hail from communities like the communities they have chosen to serve are not precluded from having the ethics and perspectives needed to be good movement lawyers. These perspectives can and are learned with practice, reflection, training, and education.
Another rather startling characteristic that emerges from Cummings’s account is the extraordinary over-representation of lawyers from all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds whose legal training occurred in a handful of the nation’s most elite law schools. Most of the lawyers whom Cummings focuses on graduated from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, and University of California Los Angeles (458). Cummings describes the way in which many of these elite lawyers—some of whom go on to powerful jobs in government, politics, and academia—benefited from immersion in clinical and social movement practices and classes in law school. This evidence begs the question of legal education and its role in supporting law students seeking public interest careers and adequately preparing them for these roles. Documenting this fact is an important contribution to the knowledge base to which Cummings’s book contributes as we find ourselves in desperate need of another generation of progressive lawyers. An Equal Place provides an opportunity to examine the legal education that contributes to these successful movement lawyers.
The value that movement lawyers add
Cummings documents how movement lawyers use a variety of techniques and resources as each situation or problem presents itself. As he points out, much of the most important work that lawyers do remains invisible as lawyers often are serving as technicians behind the scenes, amassing complex information, engaging in creative problem-solving, bridging interdisciplinary divides, and engaging in translational work. They also litigate, and Cummings offers a compelling argument for why movement lawyers can and should litigate. For one thing, litigation may be necessary for defensive reasons, such as trying to protect legal, political, and policy gains from attack by the opponents of movement goals. The lawyers in Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) study sometimes win and sometimes lose these defensive battles, but they most certainly need to engage in them. Abandoning litigation would strip movements of important ammunition that is available to all the other interests involved in the matters at issue. Litigation also serves an important defense role protecting against legal actions designed to stifle social movement activity, such as prosecution for direct action civil disobedience or strategic litigation against public participations.
Cummings is open and resolute in insisting that litigation can be an important part of a movement campaign. Sometimes litigation will be the best, or the only effective, tactic available. Cummings notes that this was especially true in the immigrants’ rights context, in which clients possess very little of the political power that is often necessary to potentially succeed in using other tactics. This is a lesson from Cummings’s study as activists contemplate the future of movements at this perilous moment: let us stop arguing about litigation versus social mobilization; let us stop constructing and impaling straw-person adversaries.
Lawyers also add value to social movements by helping to construct frameworks, organizational structures, and processes that allow for the discussion and resolution of debates and disagreements. Lawyers can help build and direct movements not by imposing their own views but, rather, by helping to create methods in which participants in movements can collectively reach decisions, process conflict, and thus move forward in identifying and advancing their collective goals. This is one of the most important conclusions of An Equal Place, and it raises a set of questions, including: how should lawyers be trained to serve this role; what best practices are emerging; and what critiques should these practices undergo?
The importance of multi-modal campaigns
Each of the Los Angeles campaigns were multi-modal campaigns in that they sought to use a broad variety of techniques and tactics as “[m]ovement actors … invariably seek the most advantageous arenas for their demands” (Cummings Reference Cummings2021, 455). Such experimentation has led activists to pursue some tactics and abandon others along the way. This conclusion can be generalized more broadly as effective movements are often those that are nimble enough to use a variety of forums and tactics. Social mobilization often requires community legal education, and local political involvement, and coalition building, and potential litigation, and electoral work. Movement lawyers should anticipate experimentation, reflection, iteration, and the transmission and transformation of ideas across organizations, time, and generations of activists learning from each other.
Relatedly, Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) engages in a short but rich discussion on the trade-offs between radicalism and pragmatism. Movement actors are constantly called upon to make judgment calls about when to prioritize pragmatism over principle. No litmus test or algorithm exists to help in these decision-making processes, and, indeed, history is littered with examples of this perennial conundrum. Only the long-term picture can provide an answer to whether movement leaders have gotten this balance right in a particular circumstance, and, even from this perspective, it is always hard to tell due to the difficulty of forward- and backward-looking assessments and the complexity of alternative or competing historical accounts. Cummings does not offer a long-term perspective, but his documentation will be invaluable when scholars return to the movements he studies as subjects of historical analysis.
Avoiding short-term judgments about failure versus success
A fourth key lesson that Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) distills from his studies is the importance of suspending judgment on the success or failure of the movements from a short-term, or even mid-term, view. As Cummings points out, in any campaign, what may appear as a failure at first may in some direct or indirect way emerge as a success in the longer view. While categorization, critique, judgment, and denunciation have had their time and place in the literature on movement lawyering, Cummings suggests that this time and place have now passed. Collaborations, for example, may succeed or not, but Cummings implies that this should not lead to blanket judgments on the effectiveness of collaborations. Information gathered in each iteration of the movement’s efforts should be considered in order to refine future decision making and problem solving. Perhaps the only clear formal prescription that Cummings offers is to suspend blanket judgments, gather facts and information, iterate, reflect, and keep going. There are no lenses available to those in the middle of a particular moment, or movement, that can forecast long-term success or failure so any pronouncements in these directions may not be productive.
The local and national connection today
Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) provides a bouquet of intriguing points on the theme of local and national power. Movement efforts to redesign local labor law have been necessitated by the rightward shift in federal power. These efforts raise complicated questions of federal and state preemption and how the labor movement interacts with allied movements—like community development, immigrant rights, and environmental justice—to build power to change policy. Cummings examines the type of local, cross-movement coalition building required to design labor law from the bottom up and considers the role of strategic legal advice and policy analysis in shaping the possibilities for city lawmaking. In broadening our understanding of the lawyering process beyond litigation to encompass legislative advocacy, economic development, and community legal education in local neighborhoods and labor markets segmented by race and immigration status, Cummings raises fundamental questions about the scope of local power, the suitability of local solutions, and the scalability of local victories. These questions are crucial to movements today and on the horizon.
In short, Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) shows how local struggles link with national issues and how actions at the national level intrude on movement goals at the local level. Los Angeles stands as a microcosm of what he aptly terms the “fracturalization” of communal life and values in the United States. Like the country as a whole, Los Angeles has had its share of what Cummings refers to as the “one percenters”—that is, highly privileged mostly white Americans who are exploiting the nation’s economy for their enormous economic gain, often exploiting labor inequity that is a byproduct of racial caste and class. Local campaigns cannot remove the national structural conditions imposed through tax and other policies. Thus, Cummings asks whether ideas and experiments generated at the local level can achieve what he calls horizontal equity (505). In understanding this connection, movement lawyers should consider the importance of electoral engagement for power building. Given the state of the nation’s core electoral politics, there is a constraint on what local activism can accomplish, which perhaps Cummings or others will study in future work.
Local legal-political mobilization campaigns: the ethical hazards of for-profit law firm partnerships
This section applies Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) theoretical framework to local legal-political mobilization campaigns conducted in partnership with for-profit law firms. Although they are common to both direct service and law reform advocacy, neither the logics of locally situated legal-political mobilization campaigns nor the ethics of for-profit law firm partnerships that are often steering those campaigns are fully developed in the law and social movement literature. Cummings’s framework advances the constructive development of that literature by linking the instrumental deployment of law—how it has been used—and the material outcome of legal advocacy—what it has achieved—to the concrete, local conditions of low-income communities and the grueling, daily struggles of low-wage workers. Meticulous in his documentation of local conditions and deft in his relational analysis of political and economic power, Cummings centers his examination of legal-political advocacy on the efforts of lawyers and activists to find equal footing in marshaling campaigns for economic security and civic participation. However, throughout this examination, despite its painstaking detail, the notion of equal footing or relational equality in campaign organization and mobilization remains elusive and unresolved not only for Cummings but also for movement lawyering more generally. This section explores the shifting, unsettled meaning of equal footing negotiated between and among lawyers, activists, and client community groups in the context of legal-political campaigns led by for-profit law firm partnerships, highlighting the structural constraints (fee generation and profit maximization) and professional norms (control and discretion) that militate against meaningful relational equality.
Local legal-political mobilization campaigns
Cummings (Reference Cummings2021, 4) places lawyers at the street-level intersection of law and politics where, assuming the loosening of deep-rooted structural and professional constraints, they sometimes effectively partner with movement actors in coordinating institutional networks, relationships, and coalitions while simultaneously “helping to identify problems; finding legal hooks to solve them; devising legal theories to advance policy; and mobilizing legal doctrine to persuade allies, policymakers, and judges.” At the local intersection of legal-political mobilization and social movement action, Cummings explains, lawyers and activists forge integrated, overlapping strategies of social change, organizing both inside and outside the vectors of law and politics when opportunities arise and where resources allow (4–5). This comparative institutional framework posits a “means” side that is centered on political opportunities, organizational resources, and individual choices and an “ends” side that is focused on concrete policy changes and social outcomes in multiple venues (courts, agencies, legislatures, private markets, and the public square). Positing a two-hemisphere framework of this kind, Cummings concedes, rekindles long-standing, foundational critiques of lawyer accountability and legal efficacy that are embedded in often overlooked lawyer/activist, lawyer/client, and lawyer/community struggles over leadership hierarchies, organizational interest conflicts, external funding stopgaps, and incremental change metrics—struggles that are typically fought against the backdrop of the “threat of reversal and backlash” (7). Alert to these critiques and sensitive to their recurring historical force, Cummings reorients his evaluative analysis through the intricate lens of campaign decision-making processes, highlighting the planning, execution, and decisional trade-offs in “issue framing, power mapping, and strategic development” by and for lawyers, activists, clients, and communities (6–7).
From this keen process-oriented standpoint, Cummings (Reference Cummings2021) tracks the evolution of legal-political mobilization campaigns, marking the interwoven tools of local movement building geographically—in terms of defined places—and strategically—in terms of labor/community advocacy tactics. Geographically, Cummings points out, “[m]ovement organizations are networked with and seek advice from a cadre of lawyers who practice both in nonprofit public interest organizations and for-profit firms” (4). Strategically, he adds, nonprofit and for-profit firms “are valued as partners because of their strategic knowledge as well as their expertise in performing discrete functions in relation to larger campaign projects” (4). In contrasting this partnership paradigm to the antecedent “top-down” model of the civil rights era, however, Cummings surprisingly understates the continuing centrality of lawyers in community advocacy campaigns and, likewise, underestimates the hazards of for-profit firm partnerships experienced by already vulnerable clients and communities.
The ethical hazards of for-profit law firm partnerships
The ethical hazards of for-profit law firm partnerships arise out of the tensions that are endemic to local legal-political mobilization campaigns. Cummings skillfully locates the source of these tensions in the familiar leadership rivalries, competing organizational interests, and recurrent funding discontinuities afflicting such campaigns. Equally important, he traces those tensions to the deeply contested decision-making process that drives such campaigns, a process marked by competition between and among lawyers, client groups, and activist organizations to set goals and shape strategies. Cummings identities and underscores these chronic tensions—these disagreements and divisions over legal-political objectives and tactics—even while acknowledging that the influence of organized labor within certain campaign coalitions situated in Los Angeles has produced the “political strength to move policy” (4).
The clash over decision-making control in local legal-political mobilization campaigns propelled by for-profit law firm partnerships carries substantial risks for economically impoverished and politically disenfranchised communities that are additionally disadvantaged by the lack of labor union backing, neighborhood group leadership, and nonprofit public interest organizational support. In this situation of scarcity and underrepresentation, a situation common to numerous US cities and suburbs, the best chance for building a local legal-political mobilization campaign around core community needs (affordable housing, economic development, environmental justice, and public health) frequently lies in the client/community negotiation of a litigation partnership with a for-profit law firm either on a pro bono or a contingency fee basis. And yet, under the American Bar Association (ABA) Model Rules of Professional Conduct, this already fraught negotiation and the for-profit firm partnership that it produces may present significant representational hazards for impoverished and disenfranchised client/community groups—notably, with respect to decision-making authority, conflicts of interest, and communication and counseling.Footnote 1
To illustrate these representational hazards, briefly consider three scenarios. For the first scenario, consider decision-making authority in the context of a for-profit law firm/community partnership where the firm decides unilaterally to forego public, neighborhood-based meetings established for the purposes of rights education and grassroots campaign mobilization in favor of private, client-only consultations on the grounds that public, non-client meetings risk the potentially damaging disclosure of confidential information or privileged communications to third persons. Under Model Rule 1.2, the lawyer bears the twin duty to “abide by a client’s decisions concerning the objectives of representation” and to “consult with the client as to the means by which they are to be pursued.”Footnote 2 To the extent that lawyer-client disagreement about the means to be used to accomplish such objectives arises, the comment accompanying Rule 1.2 instructs the lawyer to “consult with the client and seek a mutually acceptable resolution,” adding that clients “normally defer to the special knowledge and skill of their lawyer … particularly with respect to technical, legal and tactical matters.”Footnote 3
Similarly, the ABA’s Center for Professional Responsibility reiterates that Rule 1.2 “gives the client ultimate authority over the objectives, but somewhat less authority over the means employed,” mentioning that “[j]ust how much authority a client has regarding ‘means’ is not entirely clear.”Footnote 4 Indeed, the Center for Professional Responsibility acknowledges that it is not “always possible to distinguish between whether a particular decision relates to the ‘objectives’ or to the ‘means’” of representation.Footnote 5 Because of this means/ends ambiguity, the lawyer-prescribed decision to forego public, neighborhood-based meetings in local legal-political mobilization campaigns appears defensible as a means-specific procedural or tactical judgment calibrated to safeguard confidential information and privileged communications related to the representation, even if that judgment and its aftermath diminish client, non-client, and community participation and power.
Turning to more acute conflicts of interest, consider a scenario in which there is a for-profit law firm/community partnership where the firm decides independently to slow discovery and motion practice in the local campaign litigation on the grounds that settlement negotiations in a similar, though unrelated, case pending in an adjacent circuit court may work to educate the forum court procedurally and substantively, yield settlement leverage, and fuel positive media coverage and on the grounds that such a delay may afford the firm sufficient time to accommodate and rectify lawyer and nonlawyer internal staff shortages caused by its retention in other larger and likely more profitable fee-generating cases. Model Rule 1.7 prohibits lawyer representation of a client if the representation involves a concurrent, direct adversity or material limitation conflict unless the representation proves consentable.Footnote 6 By definition, a material limitation conflict exists if there is a significant risk that the representation of a client or a group of clients will be materially limited by a personal, business, or financial interest of the lawyer/law firm.Footnote 7 Notwithstanding evidence of such a competing interest and its associated risk, such representation may remain permissible in circumstances with informed consent, however attenuated that consent may prove to be in practice.Footnote 8
Last, consider a scenario of communication and counseling in the context of a for-profit law firm/community partnership where the lawyers with principal or material responsibility for the litigation campaign leave the firm to practice at another firm. Both the ABA and state ethics rules and opinions govern the obligations of departing lawyers to advise and inform their clients and, by extension, the obligations of the remaining law firm to ensure an orderly transition of client matters. Underlining the importance of prompt notification and timely communication calculated to inform clients of their option to go with the departing lawyer, remain with the firm, or choose another attorney, the rules and opinions operate to protect the client’s choice of counsel during the period of transition at issue.
Read in conjunction with the duties of communication and reasonable explanation under Model Rule 1.4 and the duties of candid advice and best interest client counseling under Model Rule 2.1, the ABA and related state rules and opinions, in this instance, direct the departing lawyers and the remaining law firm to inform the local campaign clients of the relevant change of circumstances and their transition options.Footnote 9 More pointedly, the comment to Model Rule 1.4 emphasizes that “[t]he client should have sufficient information to participate intelligently in decisions concerning the objectives of the representation and the means by which they are to be pursued, to the extent the client is willing and able to do so.”Footnote 10 The frequent and predictable absence of this scope of communication and degree of counseling demonstrates the hazards of engaging in for-profit law firm/community partnerships burdened by structural constraints and professional norms that are antithetical to meaningful and sustained client participation in local legal-political mobilization campaigns.
The ethical hazards arising out of the lawyer and law firm fiduciary obligations and professional duties of client communication and consultation, and, relatedly, the responsibilities to avoid impermissible conflicts of interest in rendering effective representation, regularly entangle for-profit law firm partnerships with clients and activists in local legal-political mobilization campaigns. Doubtless, the group- or neighborhood-centered nature of such partnerships exacerbates the complexity and likelihood of these hazards. Contrary to Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) intimation, the “political strength” of local legal-political participants—whether labor unions or otherwise—may not reduce the pervasiveness of ethical hazards for law firms or the risk of exploitation and subordination for impoverished and disenfranchised client communities.
The third wave of movement lawyers
Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) account of legal-political mobilization traces the work of a new, post-civil rights generation of lawyers embracing law as a critical, though no longer central, part of a comprehensive strategy to redistribute economic benefits and build community power locally, regionally, and nationally. While the first wave of progressive lawyers were focused on litigation and invoked federal power to obtain the substantive rights of marginalized populations, Cummings documents that the second wave of movement lawyers have integrated policy advocacy, coalition building, community education, and transactional work into their representations to advance movements. Moving forward, racial and economic justice movements will not only advance wage equity campaigns, but they will also increasingly emphasize wealth creation and redistribution as well as building alternative institutions that implement movement objectives. This section explores a possible role that can be identified in the third wave of movement lawyers, where transactional lawyers play a prominent role in working with and creating social movement organizations. By adapting lessons learned from labor advocates in Los Angeles, transactional lawyers can forgo iterations of regnant lawyering to collaborate effectively within movements.
Social movement organizations
Successful movements give rise not only to new laws and lawyering but also to new social movement organizations (SMOs) that sustain and advance movement work. SMOs played key roles in Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) Los Angeles case studies and were instrumental in producing reform in the local policy arenas. Cummings highlights the impact of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (4) among other SMOs and shows that it was particularly useful in helping to mobilize law from the top down when that approach was deemed more effective (272–74), that it served as a community anchor in the development of coalitions for new campaigns (169–70, 351), and that it brought demands on behalf of its constituents (177).
As movements grow, SMOs can support their causes by implementing their vision of social change, becoming a new power broker within the political economy, and expanding financial and legal options. As local campaigns seek a national voice and more widespread participation, SMOs will likely increase in importance. Given this, the third wave of movement lawyers should include more transactional lawyers to help form, strategically grow, and advise SMOs. Transactional lawyers could advise on how local movements can grow into national institutions while, at the same time, preserving room for variation and sensitivity to local concerns. Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) book shows how lawyers and activists can coordinate to design comprehensive strategies in which legal and political mobilization are interconnected tools. SMOs add to the kinds of strategies that a movement can take on. Consider, for example, an affordable housing cooperative formed by low-income, Latino farmworkers advocating for dignified working and living conditions. By creating a SMO, a whole new world of strategic opportunities becomes available for these farmworkers. In addition to owning affordable housing units for low-income residents, this cooperative could also facilitate economic development by leasing commercial and agricultural space to small businesses that provide services to the cooperative residents. The cooperative could also own and control utilities that provide community infrastructure, such as the community’s potable or wastewater systems, to ensure the fair and safe distribution of natural resources.
Transactional movement lawyers
In the retelling of movements, transactional lawyers are rarely, if ever, recognized as movement actors. Scholars of movement lawyering generally focus on lawyers in the role of litigators and, to a lesser extent, policy advocates. Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) case studies are unique in documenting the contributions of transactional lawyers. Transactional movement lawyers differ from litigators and policy advocates because they represent entities—often commercial businesses—that use private ordering to organize, manage risks, build affordable housing and equitable development, and transact commercial deals. Transactional lawyering is often rendered invisible because it occurs outside of the conventional public space of advocacy—for example, the courtroom and the press conference, but it remains critically important to movement advancement and the implementation of reforms. In summarizing the contributions of the community benefit agreement expert Julian Gross (181, 249–53), Cummings explains how private developers came to recognize the value of formalizing community-labor mobilization through private contracts.
Anti-poverty transactional initiatives are growing in number and notoriety, emerging from the umbrella of community economic development as a distinct practice area. In addition to legal service organizations that represent clients and that are working as clearinghouses to vet discrete transactional matters and match them with a pro bono lawyer at a partnering law firm or in a solo practice, there is an increasing presence of transactional lawyers engaged in movement work using legal frameworks to create new and capitalize existing SMOs. The role of transactional lawyers in the Movement for Black Lives is one contemporary example of how transactional lawyers are reimagining the city as a space for economic redistribution.
Notwithstanding their significance in economic justice movements, transactional lawyers can face the same pitfalls of other movement lawyers. Depending on the transaction and the SMO’s stage of development, transactional lawyers play distinct roles. They can either assume control as repeat players in complex deals—similar to the immigrants’ rights lawyers described by Cummings (Reference Cummings2021)—or adopt the advisory role of community-labor lawyers as the SMO becomes a sophisticated, powerful political party. In either context, Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) insights can help transactional lawyers develop ethical practices and effective techniques within progressive movements.
Conclusion
The purpose of this review essay has been to explore the relevance of An Equal Place to the current practice of contemporary movement lawyering in litigation, policy advocacy, and transactional contexts across the fields of civil rights, labor, and poverty law (Cummings Reference Cummings2021). We draw on a growing body of work on the lawyering process from clinical education, social movement theory, critical race theory, and legal ethics to respond to Cummings’s magisterial volume. By exploring the ethical hazards of for-profit law firm partnerships with social movements and how future racial and economic justice movements will increasingly emphasize wealth creation and redistribution through transactional representation, we hope to have underscored the importance of Cummings’s turn toward the local policy arena as a site of legal-political mobilization. In turning toward this newly contested arena, Cummings’s book provides a sweeping contemporary history of the fight to protect primarily low-wage, immigrant workers and to build equity in the increasingly unequal city.
By exploring how law and movement activism can challenge structural inequality at the city level, the book provides a roadmap for social change that may inform efforts to scale up the struggle for labor, immigration, and environmental reform to the national level. Cummings’s (Reference Cummings2021) studies teach us how to focus on the collective progressive responses to the “triple crises” spotlighted and worsened by the pandemic amid Trumpism—namely, the heightened structural economic inequalities; the pressing movements for racial equality; and the need for climate justice. The book argues about the need to continue building decentralized power to resist nationalism, white supremacism, and the rising authoritarianism unleashed after the Cummings case studies end.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Scott Cummings, Chris Schmidt, and the editors at Law & Social Inquiry for their inspiration and support.
