Keeping Sharp Your Cutting Edge
Introduction
I appreciate being invited to speak here tonight about the Review of Law & Social Change and this theme of “Page to Practice.” Your focus speaks well of your determination to remain in the avant garde of social change writing for lawyers. But to be honest, I have to acknowledge that I am facing a couple of conundrums.
The first is that when it comes to Lawyers, Law, and Social Change, the article I wrote in 1984 envisioning a very limited role for lawyers, I am not sure that I have changed my mind a lot. I still don’t think much of lawyers. I said in 1984, and I still believe now, that it is organized people(those who have been organized into groups for taking action) that make social change, not lawyers-and if lawyers have anything to contribute to social change, it is by using their skills to help the social changers to organize.
My second problem is that I remain quite ambivalent when it comes to writing pages, even though I like to write a lot as a person and have written a lot as a lawyer. As a lawyer in general, I know that a lot of our job is to invent words to justify the infliction of pain, degradation, and death.Words allow humans to exploit and kill each other with greater ease and less guilt. Words at their worst have been used to justify a lot of obscene violence, including war, torture, executions, incarcerations, elimination of health, destruction of the environment, seizures of property, and more.
Suggested Reading
Domestic Violence Reform: From Page to Practice and Back Again
Journals make a difference in shaping both policy work and litigation. Practitioners often search journals to find new ideas, to gain an understanding of what is being done on a particular problem, or to determine whether an approach has merit.
From Page to Practice
The Review is truly a bridge from page to practice because the ideas that come alive on its pages have blossomed into creative solutions that have been put into practice.
From Page to Practice and Back Again: Broken Windows Policing and the Real Costs to Law-Abiding New Yorkers of Color
My theory, and the theory behind Broken Lives from Broken Windows, is that the combined economic and legitimacy costs of aggressively policing minor offenses undermine the efficacy of policing social order to reduce crime.
From Page to Practice: Corporations as Progressive Actors
Introduction to symposium exploring potential roles corporations can play in promoting progressive values.
From Page to Practice: An Introduction
Now, just as in 1969, Social Change remains committed to providing a forum for progressive legal thought and to promoting work that bridges the gaps between page and practice.
Looking Forward to Forty More Years of Movement Building: Meditations on From Page to Practice
Institutions like Social Change can play an important role in this-providing a forum for sharing ideas and strategies, questioning prevailing wisdom, and reminding us of the importance of bringing the ideas on the page to practice.