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Contact me or see, David Dominguez, Redemptive Lawyering: The First (and Missing) Half of Legal Education and Law Practice, 37 California Western Law Review 27 (2000)

1. Thesis and Definition: Attorneys and disputants need to stretch their respective roles when dealing with hard public controversies.

   1. Conventional legal education and law practice conceptualize the role of attorney in the community as that of an expert who reacts to social conflict by acting as a zealous advocate for one interest group.

      1. Community Lawyering (CL) supplements this "expert/reactive" role with proactive, collaborative intervention.

      2. It teaches law students how to work in teams to identify and implement alternative community problem solving methods, especially to enrich formal public offices and informal social roles, cultivate long-term partnerships among diverse parties, and improve service networks.

   2. Disputants involved in public controversies may be deciding too quickly that lawyers and the legal system offer the best way to frame and process conflict.

      1. They may not pause to consider alternative ways to leverage the immediate problem to integrate other parties, values and concerns, or to use a different timeline to map out contingencies.

      2. The law serves an important role in dispute resolution but is too often used as a primary option by both "insider" groups (who are over-lawyered) and the "outsider" advocacy organizations (who are under-lawyered).

   3. Working Definition: CL helps a wide range of interest groups and stakeholders (both those presently identified and those who are implicated) to weigh the advantages of immediate access to the legal system against other forms of community problem solving, particularly community negotiation of affected public roles, plans, resources, alliances, and so on.

      1. CL teaches how to design and negotiate "wellness models," prevention schemes, and new strategic alliances of collaboration.

      2. CL affirms, however, the value of legal representation. When an advocacy group makes an informed decision that a lawsuit is the best route to take, CL shows attorneys how to work more effectively with advocacy groups and grassroots organizations, giving them a bigger say in the handling of specific legal matters as well as in the direction of public policies underlying the law.

2. CL as Taught at BYU Law School

   1. The foundational skill to be introduced at the start of the term and practiced throughout the semester is critical reflection. Critical reflection awakens law students to see how easily we render American life as a bundle of legal interests and law claims. We take stock of the bias toward framing conflict as one hard position in opposition to another hard position (distributional outcomes).

   2. The opening exercise is writing an "Updated Personal Statement": Students are handed copies of their original essay that formed part of their law school application and that spoke eloquently to their reasons for attending law school. They examine how differently they view themselves and legal education and discuss the discrepancy between what they had hoped for and what they in fact experienced. They come to see how they have been conditioned (and overwhelmed) by the law school teaching culture, the classroom environment, and other zero-sum environmental conditions (e.g., class rank, job interviews, placement in co-curricular activity). They appreciate how difficult it is to join with others to resist institutional pressure to conform to pernicious social practices.

   3. Critical reflection is sustained and honed through weekly written papers on assigned topics. Topics include, "What does it mean that I am more than just a student of the law, that I am its steward entrusted with its management, direction, and purpose?";

   4. Building on critical reflection, the next set of CL skills includes active listening, facilitation, mediation, and added-value negotiation. These skills are introduced and strengthened as students propose, consider, and finally select the field project.

3. Extending In-class Community Building into the Field: The Three Overriding Questions

   1. "Who else is at risk as I intervene with legal resources?" As I contribute the expert role of attorney, offering legal advice and representation, am I legitimizing one form of discourse at the expense of a more inclusive community dialogue? Which new voices do we need to hear?

   2. "What more is at stake?" As I think like lawyer, what am extra-legal concerns am I missing? Where are there opportunities for trading on differences that would be better addressed by teachers, police officers, clergy, etc? Am I closing files when I should be opening doors? Am I influencing others to settle for too little?

   3. "How can we meet and exceed original expectations and goals?" Although the parties may be satisfied in the short term, are they and others are better equipped to prevent or handle new problems when they occur? Knowing that our professional workload limits our sustained involvement, have we mentored others in leveraging the talents of those who remain involved?

4. An Illustration of Applying the Three Questions: The Legal and Extra-legal Problem of Establishing a Community Center at the Boulders Apartments

   1. The Boulders Apartments (Boulders) is located in the rough, low-income section of Southwest Provo. The sprawling residential complex has 388 units, approximately 1200 tenants, half of whom receive public assistance and/or are under the care of Utah State Mental Health, Utah State Workforce Services, Utah County Probation and Parole, and other service organizations. Of the 1600 calls for police service in the past 16 months, many are calls alleging domestic violence, drug activity, gang behavior, prostitution, car theft, and the like.

   2. The multicultural, multinational, multilingual residents form a microcosm of the poorer parts of Provo (and, for that matter, disadvantaged communities throughout Utah, especially those dealing with rapidly changing demographics). Provo is now 10% Latino and this segment of Provo is the fastest growing.

   3. Boulder residents face many legal and extra-legal issues in a wide variety of areas: housing, police relations, immigration, K-12 education, health care, employment, disability, cross-cultural communication, etc.

   4. The CL class began the field project by conducting many one-on-one interviews with Boulders residents and management, public officials, local leaders, police officers, agency providers, and BYU resources to get a full range of descriptions of strengths and weaknesses, assets and liabilities, histories and hopes surrounding the issues, and other relevant information.

   5. A key concern emerged among the various parties: There is no space on-site which might accommodate information sessions on the law (especially immigration and police relations), healthcare, education, English classes, career training, computer literacy, tutorial assistance for the schoolchildren, etc. Hence, the pressing question: How to establish a community center at Boulders?

   6. The initial conclusion on the part of various (angry) stakeholders was to solve the problem by mobilizing angry voices and bringing public pressure to bear; next, by directly and forcefully demanding that management dedicate adequate space for on-site community development; and, finally, by filing a lawsuit. (There is federal law that would support such legal action since the units are federally subsidized.)

   7. Asking, "Who else is at risk if we proceed with a lawsuit," we assembled small gatherings of diverse parties to demonstrate the benefits of critical reflection, active listening, facilitation, mediation and negotiation. After these meetings helped the parties to reframe the issues, they appreciated that there were many creative approaches to the problem, including an unprecedented Boulders Community Festival that was a product of dialogue, negotiation, and teamwork.

   8. Asking, "How much more is at stake than the end result of a community center at Boulders?," we have helped parties tap local university resources and form new partnerships with the local cities to address a wide range of pressing problems.

   9. Asking, "How do we meet and exceed our original expectations and goals?," one development is especially encouraging: Boulders Management, which at first was defensive and spoke of feeling "threatened," is now trying to teach managers at other residential complexes in Las Vegas and Phoenix to replicate our transformation in community relations.