These four briefly stated facts speak volumes to those who would beadvocates on behalf of the poor. First, the targets for advocacy efforts have changed radically over the past twenty-five years. Going to court and invoking the Constitution to bring about basic change for the poor is a non-starter. By now this elementary point should be fully understood, but it still comes as a shock to law students who see Brown v. Board of Education as the paradigm to end all paradigms. That a single Supreme Court ruling nine to zero can establish racial or economic justice as the law of the land is a romanticized picture of litigation. Brown was the culmination of decades of work, and implementing Brown took decades more.” Brown did not have traction until it was married to the civil rights movement, which in turn, produced a politics that spurred the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Lawyers played roles throughout this time in and around the debates in Congress and in bailing demonstrators out of jail, as well as in hundreds of follow-up school desegregation suits. Desegregation was never easy, and it never involved litigation standing alone.

Thus, achieving racial and economic justice through the courts is more complicated than it seems in gauzy retrospect, and in any case, that was then and this is now. Basic relief is obtainable from the courts now only when a state constitution presents an opportunity or when Congress or a state goes too far (which would have to be way too far) in actively injuring the poor in some way. The numbers of individual poor people who need lawyers to represent them in court far outpaces the number of lawyers currently available to represent them. Yet, when we say to law students that working the legislative process in Congress or in the states or that arguing with welfare bureaucrats is real lawyers’ work, to say nothing of working the media or strategizing with organizers, the first reaction is too often incredulity.