This collection is the fourth edited volume on cause lawyering that Sarat and Scheingold have co-produced. Given that these authors have virtually cornered the market on this topic, the challenge of this review is to consider whether this volume is distinctive enough to recommend it to both those who are and those who are not familiar with this literature.
The authors have succeeded in providing a distinctive book that will appeal to a broad audience. First, the authors seek to “move from an analysis of causes to a concern with social movements” (p. 1; emphasis added). This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it allows each author to address the larger contextual and structural constraints imposed on activist lawyers. For example, one of the most valuable essays is the second one in the volume, an account by McCann and Dudas that provides an historical and theoretical background on social movements for the pieces in the volume. Peppered with fascinating and diverse examples, it could serve as an introduction to the topic in a number of venues.
Second, the authors wish to “turn attention from the way cause lawyering articulates with the project of the organized legal profession to the explicitly political work of cause lawyers” (p. 2) in order to show what lawyers do to and for social movements. The editors' introduction indicates that the book examines under what circumstances cause lawyers in social movements move from an elitist, professional ideology privileging litigation, to a political, activist, or grassroots one that challenges traditional definitions of professionalism. A final, though less fleshed–out task, is to discuss how the methods of left and right cause lawyers converge in tactics, if not in content. Section 1 examines the life cycles of social movements and of the roles of the lawyers who inhabit them. In Section 2, the chapters focus on the professional identities of cause lawyers. Section 3 contains three scenarios in which lawyers move beyond traditional litigation to embrace other roles in social movements (e.g., writing legislation, community mobilization, and even participating in movements as nonlawyers).
The editors include a wide range of compelling empirical case studies on social movements from both sides of the political spectrum—including gay and lesbian rights, consumer rights, the pro-life movement, and environmental justice. Though the material focuses on the energies of leftist movements, scholars of conservatives (and perhaps even conservative scholars) will find something to appreciate in objective reports by den Dulk and in the pieces by McCann and Dudas, and by Sarat and Scheingold themselves. Another very welcome aspect of this volume is the degree to which the authors have clearly read and absorbed one another's work; references to other chapters in the volume are useful rather than distracting.
Certain pieces speak more centrally to the unifying themes of the introduction. Meili relies on interviews with lawyers to address the issue of what lawyers do “to and for” social movements in a chapter on consumer rights. Meili argues that cause lawyers alter their strategies based on political context—in this case, a shift from a focus on legislative advocacy appropriate in the 1960s to one of litigation in the deregulated 1980s. As a result of the new strategies, concern about lawyer dominance of the movement expanded, transforming the relationship between lawyers and consumers. Marshall, using the environmental justice movement as her template, argues that cause lawyers make problematic the assumption that there are strict dichotomies between professional and grassroots tactics, or between institutional, nondisruptive practices (litigation) and extrainstitutional disruptive practices (protests, sit-ins).
In other cases, however, it seems more like the tail wagging the dog—what do social movements do to and for lawyers? Den Dulk argues convincingly that lawyers in the evangelical movement, influenced by evangelical intellectuals, embrace a framework of rights-based claims adopted from more progressive social movements. In a vastly different selection, Hilbink describes how civil rights lawyers were changed by the movement from an “elite vanguard” to lawyer/activists. While this reversal of the stated argument is a valuable way of thinking about this relationship, I wish this had been made a more explicit theme in the introduction, thus tying the volume more closely together.
One of the common tensions for any edited book of this type is to provide enough ethnographic or methodological detail about the case studies so that the main points are sufficiently demonstrated, but not so much information that readers get lost in the detail. In this matter, the book is uneven—several of the pieces left me wanting a bit more evidence to support an author's thesis, while the lengthier case studies at the back of the book could have used more judicious editing.
This book will be useful for scholars of cause lawyers and social movements, and graduate students in law and society or social movements courses. Although the volume is interdisciplinary, it would probably be most practical for political scientists and sociologists.
