Students dedicated to the struggle for justice must see themselves as a part of movements, not separate from them
Lawyers Facilitate Injustice
Lawyers work on behalf of the State and Capital to dominate poor and working class communities. Wherever you find violence, oppression, and the capitalist system at its most cruel, you find lawyers. You find lawyers arguing on behalf of oil companies stripping Indigenous peoples of their land. You find lawyers working to ensure murderous cops escape accountability. You find lawyers working for bosses busting unions and preventing workers from seeing the fruits of their labour.
Legal victories that supposedly benefit the dispossessed are pyrrhic. When the police inevitably settle lawsuits in response to their brutality, it is taxpayers, not cops, who foot the bill (with the benefit of lining the pockets of lawyers at “prestigious” law firms like Brauti Thorning and Borden Ladner Gervais). When companies face legal accountability for polluting Indigenous lands and destroying ecosystems, they can use byzantine international corporate structures to simply avoid paying damage awards that could impact their bottom line (see the case of Chevron and Steven Donziger). Tribunals empowered to make systemic recommendations, like the Ontario Human Rights Commission, are so overwhelmingly underfunded that they are effectively useless. Impact litigation based on the Charter faces institutional limits, in part because the courts have an interest in maintaining the colonial Canadian state and in part because courts are unwilling to grapple with the law’s disproportionately cruel impact on poor and working class people.
While legal fights against eviction will almost always end in an eviction, direct resistance to police and sheriffs by tenants at the door can prevent an eviction outright by placing direct pressure on a landlord to compromise.
Labour struggles for union recognition and workplace justice exemplify how State concessions of legal “rights” failed organized communities. Workers fought and died on picket lines for union recognition and workplace dignity, eventually forcing the State to legalize and regulate their actions. By making limited concessions, the State successfully dampened labour militancy, stripping unions of their most powerful tactic. State regulation has become the labour movement’s downfall, as shown by decades of declining unionization rates and rapidly accelerating economic disparity.
At their best, legal victories reify a deeply unjust system by legitimizing the asserted neutrality of law. At their worst, legal victories fragment and demobilize organized communities by draining them of their time and resources and by decentering the role of material resistance to domination in favour of professionalized interventions in legal proceedings. If you, like me, believe that the capitalist system is inherently unjust, you must also understand that the legal system upholding the capitalist order is similarly unjust. If you, like me, see the immense and immeasurable cruelty of police and prisons as a deep evil, then you must understand that the legal system which justifies and legitimizes carceral state violence cannot ever present us with victories.
This is not to say there is no role for lawyers who are dedicated to justice in struggle. Our profession is a dirty and violent one and we must be strategic about the legal interventions we pursue.
Lawyering in Support of Movement
To be a movement lawyer is to dedicate one’s life and work to the struggle of poor and working class people. The goal of movement lawyering is transformative systemic change. Movement lawyers do not think of their work as harm reduction. We think of our work as a part of class struggle. We do not aim to make evictions less painful; we aim to prevent every eviction from happening. We do not aim to ease the criminalization of our community members by crafting plea deals; we fight cops and Crowns at every step of the way to prevent criminalization. Movement lawyers do not focus on solving discrete issues; we focus on transforming an inherently unjust system. The work of those dedicated to struggle must address the abolition of the capitalist system as a whole, not just seek redress against specific forms of domination.
Becoming a movement lawyer is a political choice. Movement lawyers are not movement lawyers because of their title or career path; they are movement lawyers because of their beliefs and actions. Movement lawyers co-strategize with poor and working class organizers. Movement lawyers fight the State when it retaliates against organizers with frivolous charges. Movement lawyers see the legal system as a political space that organized communities cannot simply concede, but must actively contest. Legal interventions co-developed by movement lawyers and organizers work in tandem with direct action to put pressure on oppressors and extract real wins and substantive concessions.
Movement lawyering requires a willingness to risk one’s professional reputation and financial security. These are risks that capitalism imposes upon poor and working class people every day. Working class people endure humiliation and exploitation in their workplaces and from their landlords. They endure oppression and violence at the hands of the State. When they organize and resist domination, poor and working class people face retaliation that jeopardizes their homes and safety. Why should lawyers be uniquely free from these sacrifices? From these risks? Who are we to place ourselves outside of the fray and above the members of the communities most affected by injustice?
It is incumbent on law students dedicated to transformative change to understand ourselves as struggling alongside oppressed communities. We must see ourselves not as servants to the movement, nor as its masters, but rather as members and co-conspirators in the transformative struggle necessary to bring about justice. We must see our goals as the same as those of organized working class communities, Indigneous land defenders, abolitionists, incarcerated persons, and all those fighting back against an immense array of oppressive institutions. When the State brings its forces to bear upon these communities, our place is not at our desks, in our offices, or amidst professionals. Our place is to be there alongside those resisting domination. We must stand, arm in arm with our comrades, and fight, actually fight, for the world we believe in.
Editor’s Note: Grayson Alabiso-Cahillis a member of the University of Toronto Law Union Steering Committee.
