Introduction to Community Lawyering Externship
Overview
Introduction to Community Lawyering introduces students to community lawyering and how lawyers can contribute their legal knowledge and skills to support community identified initiatives that highlight the community’s collective power to bring about long-lasting, transformative change. Students learn how housing policy shapes a community and work closely with community groups on preserving a community through art and advocacy.
This four-hour experiential learning course is open to 2L and 3L students and is considered a small externship (10-12 students).
Program Director
Yolanda Taylor
- Learn how to view legal problems through a community perspective
- Work with grassroots groups and coalitions working in the area of housing, land use, and development, which are both social and legal issues
- Listen and use developing legal skills to formulate creative solutions for clients experiencing marginalization and disparities in housing, food, land, and economics.
- Allow the community client group to lead
- Sit the passenger seat, because the community is the expert when it comes to issues that impact them
- How to interview a client group and identify the person who has authority to speak on behalf of the group
- Fair housing law as it relates to the goal of the Federal Fair Housing Act and affirmatively furthering fair housing
- Some aspects of housing law, but mostly about housing justice
- The difference between inequitable development and equitable development
- Concepts like “equity,” “justice,” “restorative justice,” “collective action,” “oppression,” and how they relate to problems faced by clients
- How to work collaboratively with community organizers and actual clients
- That change happens slowly and at the speed of trust
- Multi-disciplinary work
- Attend meetings with the client group and city officials during weekends or evenings
- Attend city council meetings when the client group has an item on the agenda
- Conduct research around issues involving land development, planning and zoning law
- Build on the prior work of previous students around the work of the client to create a community land trust
- Educate the client groups and their partners around issues involving housing, and zoning law
- Create solutions to client’s problems. Remove barriers they face around economic opportunity.
- Draft any necessary legal documents including advice letters to the client groups.
The Legal Profession
The legal profession has historically played a key role in maintaining systemic inequality but has also been used as a tool to fight for justice. In order to move further in the direction of the latter, lawyers have a duty to align our work to uplift the voices and demands of those who don’t have a seat at the table. Lawyers shouldn’t lead these movements but should assist the communities that do to reach their goals.
Allyssa Victory and Janani Ramachandran explain this concept well in Call To Action: The Need For Community Lawyering.
Community Lawyering
Community Lawyering, also known as “Movement Lawyering,” is a method of lawyering that lifts people rather than the law.
A Community Lawyer knows how to use the law creatively to combat structural inequalities. Community lawyers use their lawyering skills—collaborative problem solving, interviewing and counseling, negotiation, transactional drafting, and oral advocacy—through the representation of groups, coalitions and grassroots nonprofits.
Where a legal remedy ends, justice requires more when representing groups who are working to create transformative change.