However, with the collaboration question, as with many of the others that Shdaimah highlights, I found myself far more drawn to the direct sources and stories she assembled than to her critique of the scholarship. Much of what Shdaimah found confirms that lawyers are able to work with clients to secure measurable improvements in their lives, and are valued in this role by the clients, despite the fact that no transformational change in the overall conditions of poverty is on the horizon.
Her descriptions underlined the significance of the core lawyer-client collaboration – “naming, claiming and blaming” – which both confirms the clients' feelings of righteousness in their cause, and makes the most of lawyers’ skills in framing challenges and possible solutions.
Moreover, through the interviews, it was clear that the lawyers at NELS were very familiar with at least the broad contours of the literature, and aware of its conceptual significance for community-based legal centers. Shdaimah did not have the liberty of studying this kind of legal practice before and after the notion of progressive lawyering took shape, and these notions appear to already pervade legal practice at NELS.
My own view is that the lawyers’ attempt to apply such values, however constrained in practice or by compassion, is a rarely celebrated, but crucially important, advance in how we have come to imagine legal practice in these and other settings. When I was a law student, I admit to being captivated by this literature, and credit it with providing me and countless others tools for self-examination and self-awareness that have proven an invaluable part of whatever I have done.
While scholars such as Lucie White do exhort practitioners to a set of engagement-oriented norms, equally important for her and others is a call to situated practice, informed by real-life contingencies and a clear-eyed assessment of what is possible. So while Shdaimah appears somewhat dismayed by the distance between the literature and reality, I am instead reassured by how far we have come in understanding the challenges and pitfalls of lawyering in poor communities. Shdaimah’s findings at NELS of attentive, hardworking lawyers, who sensitively work with clients to secure incremental change, are actually a happy, and somewhat overdue, confirmation that real-world application of these values creates a legal practice well worth doing.
Attorney Laura MacCleery is a deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
