Talk:Law and social change

I am interested in developing an article looking at the strategy and tactics of social change as practiced by progressive lawyers. The draft I am submitting is based on United States experiences.

Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall of Howard University Law School and the NAACP (later the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) are a very famous pair of social justice advocates who used the courts as their instrument, particularly because their group, African-Americans, lacked political power in the legislatures and executive offices of the states in which legal segregation of public schools by race was carried on. Their most famous court victory, Brown v Bd of Education, set the standard for later attempts.

However, as courts in the United States grew increasingly conservative (see Yale Law Prof. Bruce Ackerman's article, "Transformative Appointments”) the courts have been less and less hospitable to progressive lawyers seeking social change.

A newer generation of lawyers began practicing the art of social change in state and federal legislative contexts, as these bodies grew more progressive, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began making the franchise more broadly available, resulting in more representative legislatures. They were beaten back by the conservative takeover of the US Congress in 1994. It is not clear that the newly elected Democratic Congress will be significantly more hospitable to such ideas.

That leaves civil society, where some progressive lawyers are beginning to see that they do their best work when supporting nongovernmental organizations that take a hands-on approach to social justice issues, helping them with their needs for legal structure, contracting, and tax advice.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_social_change" Usman23 22:46, 3 December 2006 (UTC)