A component “of [Gerald López’s] rebellious lawyering is association with everyday living and with the stories of ordinary people as a primary means of understanding and of transformation.

Another is collaboration with other lawyers and with ‘lay’ lawyers, nonprofessionals skillfully immersed in their communities.

A third component is demystification — that is, making law accessible to everyone and making subordinated people’s sense of the world accessible to lawyers.

The fourth is the fundamental reorientation of lawyering toward education in support of self-help.”

“Nonprofit law offices, like nonprofit lawyers, should, as [Jerry] López urges, amend themselves over time.”

Excerpted from Milner S. Ball, POWER FROM THE PEOPLE, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1725 (1994).

MILNER S. BALL, April 10, 1936 – April 6, 2011 was the emeritus Caldwell Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and a Presbyterian minister.  Visit here for more about Milner S. Ball and Rebellious Lawyering.

Artika Tyner has written:

“[Jerry López’s] Rebellious lawyering provides a theoretical framework for action research and fostering cooperative, collaborative processes. Rebellious lawyers’ vision of social justice requires proactiveness in effectuating social change by reflecting and ‘usher[ing] in the world we hope to create.’  In envisioning changing the world as we know it, one’s imagination can be unleashed.”

“The ideology of rebellious lawyering is based upon the premise of fostering cooperative and collaborative processes. Rebellious lawyers integrate themselves and their clients into ‘a large network of cooperating problem-solvers.’

Dr. Artika Tyner is the SSRC Emerging Scholar for January-March 2015.  SSRC, or Self-Sufficiency Research Clearinghouse, is an initiative of the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  Visit this page for more on Artika Tyner and Rebellious Lawyering.

Rebellious Lawyering is about achieving social change by empowering clients

“’Give us something we can use.’ For those of us engaged in the practice of law for social change, this is a familiar admonition directed at scholars who have developed theories on the transformation of law and the legal system.”

“Professor López’s Rebellious Lawyering is something all of us—professional and lay lawyers—can definitely use.”

“The central tenet of rebellious lawyering is the empowerment of clients. Progressive lawyers who engage clients in problem solving can shift power from themselves to clients, enabling clients to collaborate in the process of social change. In this way, the lawyer-client relationship can provide a seed for the shifting of social arrangements that can empower subordinated groups.”

“As López states, ‘if people subordinated by political and social life can learn to recognize and value and extend their own problem-solving know-how, they . . . may gain confidence in their ability to handle situations that they would otherwise experience as utterly foreign and unmanageable, with or without a lawyer as representative.’”

The above is excerpted from Angelo N. Ancheta, COMMUNITY LAWYERING, 81 Cal. L. Rev. 1363 (1993) (see also Angelo N. Ancheta, COMMUNITY LAWYERING, 1 Asian L.J. 189 (1994)).

“At some level, our collective interest in sharing the personal is recognition that the personal is seldom purely personal in the sense of being limited to the individual, but instead reaffirms our connection to one another and, in so doing, informs meaning. For a more comprehensive account of the life of a public interest lawyer, I suggest reading, GERALD P. LOPEZ, REBELLIOUS LAWYERING: ONE CHICANO’S VISION OF PROGRESSIVE LAW PRACTICE (1992).”

john a. powell, in RIGHTING THE LAW: SEEKING A HUMANE VOICE, 96 W. Va. L. Rev. 333 (1993-1994)

Michelle S. Jacobs:

“[W]e need to engage more fully in ‘rebellious lawyering.’  As delineated by Lopez, it is only when we engage in rebellious lawyering that we will truly allow our clients to participate as equals in decision-making process and thus as equals in the lawyer-client relationship.”

“Reflecting back to the case if DuJon Johnson, for example, if Cunningham and his students engaged in rebellious lawyering, they would be required to know something about the history of black-white relations in Ypslinati, Michigan.”

Excerpted from Michelle S. Jacobs, PEOPLE FROM THE FOOTNOTES: THE MISSING ELEMENT IN CLIENT-CENTERED COUNSELING, 27 Golden Gate U. L. Rev. 345 (1997).

Michelle S. Jacobs is a Law Professor at University of Florida School of Law in Gainesville, Florida.

Marie A. Failinger on “Rebellious Lawyering” as Dialogical Praxis:

“Dialogical praxis exemplifies many post-modern virtues. It abandons universality in the form of abstract justice for a practically and historically located practice: Thinking is in service of doing, and thinking starts with the here-and-now, not someone’s grand idea…. [A]s… some dialogical praxis theorists like Gerald López claim… problem-solving does not abandon theory, which is as necessary to rebellious lawyers as ‘close observation and sensible strategies [because it is vital to] an ability to maintain a long-range goal . . . while working toward the incremental accomplishment of less obviously radical tasks.’”

Cited from Marie A. Failinger, FACE-ING THE OTHER: AN ETHICS OF ENCOUNTER AND SOLIDARITY IN LEGAL SERVICES PRACTICE, 67 Fordham L. Rev. 2071 (1999).

Marie A. Failinger is a Law Professor at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Visit here for more about Marie A. Failinger.

Stephanie Tai on “Rebellious Lawyering” in Context of Environmental Justice

“Critics of Lopez’s ‘rebellious lawyering’ model often point to successful community lawyering efforts that have emphasized traditional transactional client-oriented litigation rather than community empowerment. However, even lawyers of the traditional model attend community meetings and local protests, serve on community boards, and are reminded that ‘they are part of their communities.’ What is crucial may not be the lawyer’s method of operation, but rather, their ability to share their clients’ vantage points.”

Excerpted from Stephanie Tai, ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS AND THE RICHMOND LAOTIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY: A CASE STUDY IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, 6 Asian L.J. 189 (1999)

Stephanie Tai is Associate Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin School of Law.

Peter H. Schuck on “Rebellious Lawyering,” public law litigation, and social reform:

“[Gerald P. Lopez’s] Rebellious Lawyering is… an engagingly written, insightful, often moving argument in favor of a distinctive conception of professional responsibility by progressive lawyers: more humane, engaged, client-centered, self-abnegating, unheroic, and situational. All lawyers, progressive or not, should take up this challenge, for it invites us to ‘disenthrall ourselves,’ to ‘think anew’ about how and why we live in the law as we do.”

Excerpted from Peter H. Schuck, PUBLIC LAW LITIGATION AND SOCIAL REFORM, 102 Yale L.J. 1763 (1993).

Peter H. Schuck is Simeon E. Baldwin Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.

Susan R. Jones on “Rebellious Lawyering” and Community Economic Development:

“A seminal concept in the legal literature about lawyering for subordinated individuals and groups is the notion of rebellious lawyering. Rebellious lawyering (also known as critical lawyering) seeks to empower subordinated clients and questions whether legal intervention is good for the client’s material existence.  Rebellious lawyering is juxtaposed to regnant (or traditional) lawyering. Regnant lawyering reflects the traditional paradigm of the preeminent problem solver, formally representing others primarily in a litigation setting.”

Excerpted from Susan R. Jones, SMALL BUSINESS AND COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: TRANSACTIONAL LAWYERING FOR SOCIAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE, 4 Clinical L. Rev. 195 (1997).

Susan R. Jones is Clinical Law Professor at George Washington University School of Law.

Alicia Alvarez on Gerald P. López’s Rebellious Lawyering: “lawyers ‘must know how to collaborate with other professional and lay allies’” and “‘open ourselves to being educated by the subordinated . . . about their traditions and experiences.’”

“Within the idea of ‘rebellious lawyering against subordination,’ lawyers ‘must know how to collaborate with other professional and lay allies.’ We ‘must understand how to educate those with whom [we] work about law and professional lawyering’ and ‘[we] must open ourselves to being educated by the subordinated . . . about their traditions and experiences.’ Lawyers need to be able to work with legal and non-legal approaches to problems; they must participate in–as well as build–coalitions. This form of lawyering contrasts with the regnant idea of lawyering, where lawyers formally represent clients, by working alone for them in a relationship where the lawyers dominate and the clients are only present when absolutely necessary. In the regnant model, lawyers work in isolation of ‘the know-how and problem solving sensibilities of others.’ The regnant lawyer equates what she does best and feels most comfortable doing, ‘with what most helps the politically and socially subordinated.’ As a result, social disputes are often resolved by litigation, regardless of whether some other strategy might make more sense.”

“Lawyers interested in working with community members more closely are drawn to community development as a lawyering strategy that seeks greater collaboration with client groups. Some see work with community organizations as allowing for the possibility of community empowerment. ‘The purpose of empowerment lawyering . . . is to enable a group to gain control of the forces which affect their lives.’ This type of work gives the lawyer the potential to join–rather than lead–the persons represented.”

Cited from Alicia Alvarez, COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CLINICS: WHAT DOES POVERTY HAVE TO DO WITH THEM?, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1269 (2007).

Prof. Alicia Alvarez is a clinical professor of law and director of the Community and Economic Development Clinic at University of Michigan School of Law.

Visit here for more on Alicia Alvarez. 

Marc­ Tizoc González on the Role of Gerald P. López’s Rebellious Lawyering in LatCrit, Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory.

“Drawing on the emerging field of critical [geographic information systems (GIS)], and feminist and grounded-visualization approaches, [Denise] Pacheco and [Veronica N.] Velez contribute provocative ideas about “the politics of representation inherent in maps,” and situated knowledges “[that acknowledge] the positionality of the GIS mapmaker in constructing knowledge;” ultimately, they are interested in the possibilities of using GIS in classrooms “as a discursive tactic to create ‘counter­maps,’ or … “subversive cartographies’ [that] challenge dominant representations of the world.” Synthesizing these concepts and practices into a “critical race spatial analysis in education,” presented by Professors Pacheco and Velez with Professor Daniel Solorzano at the 2007 American Education Research Association conference in Chicago, Professors Pacheco and Velez answer directly Professor Francisco Valdes’s adaptation of Professor Gerald López’s famous articulation of the rebellious idea of lawyering against subordination. They assert, ‘In order to adequately respond to social inequity, we must first understand how society functions and begin to envision the society we desire …. [We] must couple our analysis with active participation in the creation of communities that can wrestle with what it means to actually enact democracy and fairness.’”

Excerpted from Marc ­Tizoc González, CLUSTER INTRODUCTION: EDUCATION AND PEDAGOGY: COUNTER­DISCIPLINARITY IN THE CRITICAL EDUCATION TRADITION IN LATCRIT THEORY, 8 Seattle J. for Soc. Just. 107 (2009).

Marc Tizoc González is Associate Professor of Law at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami Gardens, Florida.

“'[R]ebellious lawyering’ [is a vision of lawyering] where lawyers ground their work in the communities of the subordinated themselves, living with and working alongside their clients with a deep commitment to the community.”

“…López[‘s] model of rebellious lawyering certainly provides a superior model of representation where an attorney can better understand the problems facing a community, represent that community’s needs, allocate the community’s own resources, and conceive of real solutions.  …[R]ebellious lawyering of that sort is significantly more likely to lead to representation that understands the clients. As far as respecting one’s clients, López has the upper­ hand… breaking down the barriers of prestige and exclusivity to better understand how to organize for change.”

Excerpted from Mark Egerman, RULES FOR RADICAL LAWYERS: ADVANCING THE ABORTION RIGHTS OF INMATES, 21 Colum. J. Gender & L. 46 (2011).

Visit here for more about Mark Egerman, who is the co-founder of Cover, which is a leader in the restaurant mobile payments services.

“When stereotypes or overfamiliarization with both problems and people from a community begin to drive the lawyering of individuals, there is significant danger in the failure to see viable solutions that may be available or problems with the ‘standard’ approach and its applicability to an individual’s unique circumstance. An example of this is contained in the description of a lawyer in a progressive non-profit office in Gerald Lopez’ Rebellious Lawyering. Boz, a housing attorney in Lopez’ scenario, was seen as not expecting ‘more than a beaten down, resourceless, uncooperative client. The repertoire of formal strategies Boz seems willing to explore was as stingy and inflexible as her attitude toward clients. She handled her load ‘case by case’ in the most mechanical sense.’ This can occur when lawyers do not see their clients in context — but only in relation to their legal problems, and when they see them individually, without the context of community.”

Christine Zuni Cruz, [ON THE] ROAD BACK IN: COMMUNITY LAWYERING IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES, 5 Clinical L. Rev. 557 (1999) 

Christine Zuni Cruz is Dickason Professor and Associate Dean for the Indian Law Program at University of New Mexico School of Law.

“[I]n Rebellious Lawyering, Gerald Lopez argues for antisubordination theorizing that focuses on practical community-centered lawyering. He offers a foundation for progressive lawyering grounded in the particulars of peoples’ lives, supportive of community members’ problem-solving skills, and sensitive to the dynamics of neighborhood, local, state, and national politics.”

Excerpted from:

Eric K. Yamamoto, CRITICAL RACE PRAXIS: RACE THEORY AND POLITICAL LAWYERING PRACTICE IN POST-CIVIL RIGHTS AMERICA, 95 Mich. L. Rev. 821 (1997).

Eric K. Yamamoto is Fred T. Korematsu Professor of Law and Social Justice at University of Hawai’i School of Law.

“According to Professor Gerald López, lawyers should embrace a ‘rebellious lawyering’ model, one which demands that lawyers and those with whom they work ‘nurture sensibilities and skills compatible with a collective fight for social change.’ Rebellious lawyers practice collaborative advocacy, connecting with the community they serve and working with their client community, not just on its behalf. They must adopt a problem-solving orientation appropriate for working with others. This model involves brainstorming, designing, and executing strategies that respond immediately to particular problems, while at the same time fighting social and political subordination.  This multi-layered approach is consistent with Professor Stephen Ellman’s observation that lawyers working on behalf of those who would otherwise lack adequate representation to achieve social reform must find strategies that ‘target broad situations rather than individual circumstance[s].’ These strategies are necessary because problems are often related to social conditions and because the needs faced by the poor will always exceed their lawyers’ capacity to meet them.“

From Amy M. Reichbach, LAWYER, CLIENT, COMMUNITY: TO WHOM DOES THE EDUCATION REFORM LAWSUIT BELONG, 27 B.C. Third World L.J. 131 (2007).

Amy M. Reichbach is a Hearing Officer at the Massachusetts Bureau of Special Education Appeals.

“On an even larger scale, legal services, public interest, and clinical lawyers have adopted the ‘rebellious lawyering’ moniker, but few have assimilated Gerald López’s critique and reformulation of public interest practice from the book that gave a name to the movement.”

Cited from Sameer M. Ashar, LAW CLINICS AND COLLECTIVE MOBILIZATION, 14 Clinical L. Rev. 355 (2008).

Sameer M. Ashar is Clinical Professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine and co-director of the UC Irvine Immigrant Rights Clinic.

“Gerald López, creator of the rebellious-lawyering model of ethics, argues that discretionary power gives a lawyer her sense of identity. He unabashedly rejects the idea that lawyers should ‘disavow their legitimate claim on giving life to their convictions through their work, or deny the inevitability of expressing their values through choices and judgments they make in choosing and working with clients.’ He notes that progressives who want lawyers to give up discretion are seen by their worst critics as wanting to ‘level and neuter lawyers, leaving them without convictions and commitments.’ Instead of trying to dismantle the construct, López argues that the lawyer can exercise discretion to determine a client’s ends and goals by having a sense of what the community’s interests are.”

“At present, the rebellious-lawyering model is the most popular oppositional ethics approach. López created the model in part because he recognized that progressive lawyers were struggling against the regnant or traditional model of lawyering.”

Camille Gear Rich is Professor of Law and Sociology at University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

“[Gerald] Lopez indicates one of the reasons why lawyering for empowerment or ‘rebellious lawyering’ is not prevalent is that even ‘[t]hough millions in this country live in social and political subordination and though lawyers have worked to help challenge these conditions, law schools only rarely have understood their job to include designing a training regimen responsive to this situation and this task.’ Lopez takes up this task and proposes a curriculum for legal education and training of students to work with, and for, the poor and powerless.”

Excerpted from William P. Quigley, REFLECTIONS OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS: LAWYERING FOR EMPOWERMENT OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS, 21 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 455 (1994).

“The odds are weighted against those who advocate for fundamental social change. As a result, if we are to engage in rebellious lawyering rather than serve as functionaries of the status quo, we need to assess the significance of a legal victory not simply in terms of whether our clients are the ‘prevailing’ party, but in terms of the justice that has (or has not) been achieved. This requires expanding our vision of both rights and remedies.”

“Innovative, humanity-focused lawyering helps us stretch common understandings of what falls within the realm of legal remedies. The coram nobis cases took a remedy at the ‘edge’ of the box and infused it with new life and meaning. Similarly, the human rights cases that have been brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act illustrate the importance of utilizing remedies that are theoretically available within our legal system, but rarely utilized. In turn, this kind of rebellious lawyering can open up space for effective community mobilizing.”

Excerpted from Natsu Taylor Saito, REBELLIOUS LAWYERING IN THE COURTS OF THE CONQUEROR: THE LEGACY OF THE HIRABAYASHI CORAM NOBIS CASE, 11 Seattle J. for Soc. Just. 89 (2012).

Natsu Taylor Saito is a Law Professor at Georgia State University College of Law.

“The question looms: ‘[I]f these diseases can be [prevented], why do black men continue to live an average of seven years less than white men?’ What role… does ‘common sense racism’ or ‘everyday racism’ play in this tangle of medical, racial, and economic factors?”

“[W]e need to spend more time working with, if not within, real communities, especially those that are the concrete sites of material deprivation.”  “The cited scholarship is indebted to Gerald P. López, Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice (1992).”

Cited from John O. Calmore, DISPLACING THE COMMON SENSE INTRUSION OF WHITENESS FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT: “THE CHICANO FIGHT FOR JUSTICE IN EAST L.A.” 92 Cal. L. Rev. 1517 (2004).

John O. Calmore (1945-2009) was Professor of Law at University of North Carolina School of Law.

“For [Social Security Disability] representatives who perceive their advocacy in the more radical terms we describe above, the opening statement is indispensable. The opening statement presents one of the ‘practical moments’ that often go unnoticed. These moments may actually provide a central opportunity for rebellious lawyering, in part because they are ‘unpredictable’ and, thus, among the ‘‘small everyday details’ of practice that offer the greatest chance of reorienting the traditional sensibilities and skills of advocacy.’”  (Citing Rebellious Lawyering (1992))

Excerpted from Linda S. Durston and Linda G. Mills, TOWARD A NEW DYNAMIC IN POVERTY CLIENT EMPOWERMENT: THE RHETORIC, POLITICS, AND THERAPEUTICS OF OPENING STATEMENTS IN SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY HEARINGS, 8 Yale J.L. & Feminism 119 (1996).

“[S]ome of the harshest critiques of the lawyer’s role now appearing in law reviews are written by former public interest lawyers who criticize their own work as ‘inevitably’ subordinating clients despite their best efforts to empower them.”

“Perhaps the most balanced assessment of the moral dangers of public interest lawyering is GERALD P. LOPEZ, REBELLIOUS LAWYERING: ONE CHICANO’S VISION OF PROGRESSIVE LAW PRACTICE (1992).”

Cited from Clark D. Cunningham, SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T MAKE A DENT, BUT THEY KNOW YOU’VE BEEN THERE: THE LAWYER AS GOD’S WITNESS, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1962 (1993).

Excerpted from Eduardo R.C. Capulong, CLIENT ACTIVISM IN PROGRESSIVE LAWYERING THEORY, 16 Clinical L. Rev. 109 (2009):

“A contending school of thought sees little problem with lawyers functioning as both technicians and organizers. In his influential book, for example, Gerald López calls for ‘rebellious lawyers’ to be ‘co-eminent’ practitioners with their clients. Instead of a hierarchical attorney-client relationship in which the lawyer always formally represents the client, López envisions a problem-solving, collaborative approach in which the client’s expertise is accorded equal weight.”

“López’s 1992 book, Rebellious Lawyering, was perhaps the most influential work to offer a systematic approach in this regard. Criticizing what he termed ‘regnant’ lawyering, he argued for a vision of ‘teaching self-help and lay lawyering’ and of ‘co-eminent’ practitioners of lawyers and clients. The ‘rebellious lawyer,’ López argued,

‘must know how to work with (not just on behalf of) women, low-income people, people of color, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and the elderly. They must know how to collaborate with other professional and lay allies rather than ignoring the help that these other problem-solvers may provide in a given situation. They must understand how to educate those with whom they work, particularly about law and professional lawyering, and, at the same time, they must open themselves up to being educated by all those with whom they come in contact, particularly about the traditions and experiences of life on the bottom and at the margins.’”

“López argued that rebellious lawyers must ground themselves in the communities and lives of the subordinated, continually evaluate legal and nonlegal approaches, know how to strategize, build coalitions—and appreciate how all that they do with others requires attention not only to international, national, and regional matters but also to their interplay with seemingly more mundane local affairs. At bottom, the rebellious idea of lawyering demands that lawyers (and those with whom they work) nurture sensibilities and skills compatible with a collective fight for social change.”

“As Angelo Ancheta summarized in his review essay of López’s book: ‘Lopez’s rebellious lawyers . . . are deeply rooted in the communities in which they live and work. They collaborate with other service agencies and with the clients themselves; they try to educate members of the community about their rights; they explore the possibilities of change and continually reexamine their own work in order to help their clients best. Rebellious lawyering thus redefines the lawyer-client relationship as a cooperative partnership in which knowledge and power are shared, rejecting a relationship limited to an active professional working on behalf of the passive, relatively powerless layperson.’”

“López anchored his theory on a narrative-based understanding of persuasive problem-solving. The use of narrative and story-telling became a dominant feature of postmodern scholarship in the 1990s. Eschewing structuralism and ‘meta-theory,’ some proponents–though not López–even argued that the very act of telling marginalized and silenced stories would destabilize existing institutional arrangements. Persuasion was key. As López himself explained: ‘We see and understand the world through “stock stories.” These stories help us interpret the everyday world with limited information and help us make choices about asserting our own needs and responding to other people. These stock stories embody our deepest human, social and political values. At the same time, they help us carry out the routine activities of life without constantly having to analyze or question what we are doing … . To solve a problem through persuasion of another, we therefore must understand and manipulate the stock stories the other person uses in order to tell a plausible and compelling story – one that moves that person to grant the remedy we want.’”

“Lopez’s approach was very influential. Indeed, his approach crystallized the progressive critique of liberal public interest law practice as undermining, rather than furthering, client activism. Many activist lawyers now self-consciously aspire to practice ‘rebelliously.’”

“For López, grand narratives were suspect. His larger project emanated simply from the lawyer-client collaboration and ‘as an instrument of practical problem-solving and daily living.’”