Empowerment without Power? The Possibilities and Limits of Right to Counsel

• In Event: Assessing the Right to Counsel: Eviction Prevention and Broader Impacts

Abstract

In this paper, we examine civil right to counsel (RTC) through the lens of power, sensitizing us to both its possibilities and its limits. RTC programs are often the product of tenant organizing campaigns, community-led efforts that result in the codification of new rights and establishment of new funding streams. Such campaigns recognize and activate the latent potential of tenants as a political class. The power-building exercise that underlies the enactment of such programs can shift individuals’ understanding of their own agency relative to the state, though this may prove illusory in practice. 

For tenants in cities that have established RTC programs, increased access to legal representation can foster a sense of empowerment—the feeling that you can efficaciously, even if not successfully, navigate the legal system. Yet as I explore in my recent book, Uncivil Democracy (co-authored with Mallorey E. SoRelle), individual people having experiences of empowerment is very different from marginalized communities building and exercising power that alters the structures affecting their lives. This paper builds on the theoretical framework developed in the book to look at the particular case of eviction and RTC. Through in-depth interviews with tenants who experienced eviction in two cities with RTC programs (Detroit, MI and Boulder, CO), we explore how tenants understand RTC and the eviction court process in relation to power. 

We find that tenants interpret their experiences with RTC through varied lenses, with some tenants feeling empowered and others outlining specific ways that RTC programs reinforced their disempowerment. Even further, we theorize a distinction between (individual level) empowerment and (structural) power in marginalized communities. We then draw on the interview data to demonstrate the implications of this distinction as it emerges in tenants’ lives. This research has broad and important implications for RTC policies, access to civil justice, and U.S. democracy writ large.

Author

• Jamila D Michener, Cornell University
  Presenting Author