Imagining Law by Reimagining Work: The Future of Civil Rights Legal Practice and Social Change

• In Event: 30254 - Professionall Legal Practices

Abstract

Civil rights law has long served as a battleground for contesting visions of equality, fairness, and justice in the United States. Among the key actors in this field are civil rights lawyers, who find themselves facing a new challenge. Scholars of law and social movements have shown that how lawyers imagine and enact legal futures can profoundly shape social change. Yet, recent legal, financial, and institutional constraints have limited the ability civil rights lawyers have to imagine and enact the possibilities of civil rights law for social change. As they confront how to pursue social change in times of constraint, this paper uses imagined futures as a tool to access how civil rights lawyers understand the necessary conditions by which the law can facilitate social change.

Through a case study of how the civil rights bar in Illinois imagines the future of law and racial justice, this paper asks: How do civil rights lawyers imagine the future of the racial justice through law? What do their imagined futures reveal about how they perceive the relationship between law and social change? Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with civil rights lawyers barred in Illinois, this paper finds that within participants’ utopic visions of law and racial justice, they reimagine the very nature and conditions of legal work. Specifically, they highlight transformations in three key dimensions of their practice: lawyering, temporality, and epistemology. They envision a profession built on interdisciplinary collaboration, a more nuanced understanding of legal change as cyclical rather than linear, and courts that recognize systemic inequalities as legitimate legal claims. These findings reveal that for civil rights lawyers, the law’s future ability to foster social change depends not just on legal doctrine or societal shifts but on reimagining the culture, institutional structures, and cognitive foundations of legal practice itself.

Author

• Ewurama A Okai, Northwestern University