What Is Movement Lawyering Really For?

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders of this country masked their power grab in the lofty language of equality and inalienable rights. And although they did not mean these rights applied to everyone, the codification of these sentiments in our governing documents have provided tools for excluded people—particularly Black people— to struggle against our oppression and carve our way to liberation. Law for Black Lives was built inside that struggle, and after ten years of advancing this work, we have something to say about what’s happening now and where movement lawyering needs to go.

On a backdrop of a society where the law provides the explicit rules of engagement, the law and those wielding it have significant influence over the struggle for liberation. Despite declarations that our society is a democracy, those with governing and political power have been reluctant to share it with the people. Despite celebrations of progress, there is still resistance to naming the residual harms.

In fact, in the name of moving forward, the courts have pushed back on us using law and policy to acknowledge and address the harms of the past, even as these harms persist in the present. What we are seeing now, requires an honest conversation between movement lawyers, the movements we support, and the stakeholders supporting and funding our work towards Black liberation.

The Tactics Causing the Harm of the Present Are Not New

The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act is not the first time the Supreme Court decided Black folks have had enough rights.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders of this country masked their power grab in the lofty language of equality and inalienable rights.

As far back as 1883, through the adjudication of the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court decided to limit what could be considered “badges and incidents of slavery,” which the Thirteenth Amendment had empowered Congress to remedy. The Supreme Court essentially determined that Congress could not use the Thirteenth Amendment to pass anti-discrimination laws against private parties. And although the decision to limit the use of the Thirteenth Amendment was later revisited, lawyers then felt compelled to base their legal arguments on race-blind powers, like the Commerce Clause, to attempt to destroy racial discriminatory schemes. In fact, much of the foundation of federal civil rights law is rooted in the Commerce Clause, which provides Congress with the power to regulate interstate commerce. Although it is a simple assertion of power, civil rights advocates have fought to have the clause broadly applied to prohibit racial discrimination in public accommodations and private businesses.

Similarly, the Supreme Court has pushed back against policy initiatives that attempted to address harms done to Black folks. In cases like Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña (1995), it was determined that there needed to be a compelling interest for the state to ever consider race in its actions—and any time it did, that action would be placed under the closest of microscopes and held up to strict scrutiny, even if it was to right a wrong.

In 2023, the Court continued to restrict progress by striking down Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action admissions programs, because these institutions considered race in a way that would benefit Black folks and remedy past harms of exclusion.

Lawyers often, in the name of the more immediate win, have for the most part acquiesced to the terms of the court, which demand we not name white supremacy explicitly. But what is the cost?

Our governing documents provided tools that the excluded people, particularly Black people, have used to struggle against our oppression and carve our way to liberation.

Through the focus on explicit intentional discrimination and the demand for colorblind policies and solutions, we have allowed those committed to the subjugation of Black people to gaslight us about our experiences and allowed them to mask their desire to maintain power. To avoid their minefields and pitfalls, we have used euphemisms like “disenfranchised,” “impoverished,” and “disinvested,” when discussing the systemic harms done to Black folks. These vague terms, coupled with pushing for policy solutions that carved some relief but little power for the oppressed, have allowed the oppressors to pretend the law is a neutral arbiter, while playing legal games against us—all in the name of progress.

And what has that brought us? In this moment where we are witnessing Black communities continuing to be starved by a lack of resources, locked out of the economy, and suffering under physical and violent containment, what has tiptoeing around the reality of the power dynamic in the country brought us?

In this moment of rising authoritarianism, where affirmative action has been cast aside, the Voting Rights Act dismantled, and any and every hard-fought-for win is being demonized and discarded, what has asking softly in the name of pragmatism done? By pulling back from calling white supremacy by its name, we have sacrificed progress toward righting the power imbalance in this country.

We have not been bold enough, and that has been a mistake.

Where Lawyering for Liberation Needs to Go

Movement lawyering as a discipline has exploded in recognition over the last decade, as folks have leaned into the struggle for power. As part of this growing ecosystem, Law for Black Lives was founded as a political home for lawyers and legal workers committed to Black liberation. Since 2016, we have carried forward a practice rooted in the Black radical tradition, working alongside organizers, communities, and movements on the front lines of that struggle.

When a practice grows in popularity, its language tends to spread faster than its roots. Movement lawyering is deeply rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, in recognition that to lawyer on behalf of liberatory efforts is to strive for transformative social change by building the power of oppressed people. The Black Radical Tradition pushes us to keep liberation as our North Star and to judge our actions through their ability to alter the power dynamics in the people’s favor by thinking and acting radically in the Ella Baker sense of the word—by addressing the root of the problem. And while movement lawyering is not exclusively the domain of Black legal workers, it requires a politic that is genuinely rooted in this tradition, and that grounding cannot be carried forward by taking the language and leaving the roots.

Movement lawyering was not born in an institution or in law schools. It grew from generations of collective defense, community organizing, and the hard-won understanding that the law has never been a neutral instrument. Black communities experienced the law as a weapon long before anyone thought to frame it as a site of struggle. The Black Radical Tradition demands that movement lawyers be clear in how their wielding of the law supports the long-term power-building efforts of oppressed people and engage in lawfare that shifts the terrain. It demands movement lawyers to make direct challenges to the legitimacy of the law in dictating the status quo.

Lawyers who take up the practice must follow the lead of the people closest to the conditions, full stop. This means accepting and respecting that this work is fundamentally local. It does not live in national convenings, well-funded legal organizations, or polished partnership decks. It lives in the cities, in neighborhoods, in the specific relationships between legal workers and the organizers they serve.

There’s another element we can’t afford to ignore: legal work is also narrative work. Every case, every defense, and every intervention tells a story about who deserves protection, what the state is allowed to do, and the limits of power. The narrative that gets constructed in and around legal work either reinforces the logic of the system or pushes back against it. It either centers the humanity of the people being defended or reduces them to their circumstances.

When legal workers practice this work disconnected from the history, political grounding, and legacy of movement lawyering, they lose the ability to shape these important narratives with clarity and intention. They become technically competent but politically unmoored. They might win a case and still advance a frame that makes the next organizer less safe. They might use the language of abolition publicly, while their legal strategy reinforces the very logic abolitionists are working to dismantle.

This is the gap Law for Black Lives has spent ten years working to close. It is a tradition built on the understanding that the law has limits. The law is a tool and not a destination, and movement legal strategy is only radical when it is accountable to the movements it serves. Movements are being surveilled, criminalized, and defunded. Organizers are being targeted by the state with a level of coordination and aggression that demands a sophisticated, grounded legal response. This is not the moment for legal work or legal workers who perform movement politics but remain disconnected from the communities absorbing the most harm.

In a coalition landscape being tested by repression, shrinking resources, and political confusion, the grounded legal infrastructure I’ve described is the load-bearing support we need to keep pushing forward. Law for Black Lives is stepping into its next decade with those questions at the center. The work ahead requires not just lawyers, but skilled legal tacticians; people who want to understand the political and historical terrain that shaped this practice, who bring real skill and discipline to carrying it forward, and who want to work from inside the Black Radical Tradition rather than beside it.

In this moment where political clarity is needed to truly fight against the imposition of authoritarianism, it is important to be clear about what, and how, lawyering will support the vision of a liberated future.