Ambivalence in Advocacy: How Lawyers Selectively Embrace the Law’s Legitimacy

• In Event: 40401 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session II

Abstract

Based on four and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork at a Los Angeles-based legal aid organization and over 100 in-depth, qualitative interviews with immigration attorneys, this study examines lawyers’ perceptions of the U.S. asylum system’s legal, moral, and institutional legitimacy. It illuminates widespread ambivalence among attorneys surrounding the legitimacy of immigration courts, authorities, and procedures—and, in some cases, surrounding the law’s authority more generally. The study reveals that attorneys’ day-to-day experiences within the immigration system inform these perceptions, as lawyers witness fallible adjudicators, circus-like proceedings, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Importantly, however, the study also highlights that attorneys’ ambivalence may predate their experiences as legal practitioners—indeed, it may comprise the original catalyst behind their entry into the legal profession. In short, the implications of deeply-felt skepticism—or even cynicism—towards the law vary: institutional distrust may demoralize lawyers, or it may inspire lawyerly action.

This paper intervenes in existing sociolegal scholarship in two ways. First, it nuances the literature on cause lawyering, which largely overlooks how aspects of individual lawyers’ personal identities—especially their education, race and ethnicity, family immigration history, and early childhood experiences—shape their sense of purpose and their perceptions of the legal environment in which they work. Second, it enriches the literature on legal consciousness by showing how everyday understandings of the law remain activated within the perspectives of formally trained, credentialed legal experts. Ultimately, legal experts may actively maintain a foundational distrust of the law, even as they selectively instrumentalize its authority in leveraging their own social capital as attorneys. At bottom, this study proposes new ways of understanding lawyers’ liminal status as both insiders and outsiders to the legal institutions they operate within. It also contributes to broader timely debates about how legal experts strategically engage everyday people’s wariness of key legal institutions.

Author

• Catherine Louise Crooke, University of California-Los Angeles