Civil Justice at the Crossroads

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Symposium – 2023 – Access to Justice

Civil Justice at the Crossroads

Should Courts Authorize Nonlawyers to Practice Law?
by  Bruce A. Green  

In this Essay, Bruce A. Green describes how a 1917 misdemeanor case charted the course of civil justice in America for over a century and urges state judiciaries to change course. Instead of impeding nonlawyers from helping unrepresented people with their legal problems, as courts have done for more than a century, he argues that courts should use their regulatory authority to let certified paralegals, social workers, and other nonlawyers train to do legal work that they can capably do.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

Building Radical Hope in the Immigrant City

A Conversation with Jess Andors and Dan Rivera
by  Jess Andors & Dan Rivera  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson captures how the idea of narrative is inextricable from the intertwined problems of economic collapse, poverty, divestment, and racism. By shining a light on small victories in the places in the country where progress is not expected like Lawrence, Massachusetts, the book tells people in similar places that progress is possible.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

The Deserving Poor

by  Michelle Wilde Anderson  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson chronicles the fights to save four places that are usually put on the undeserving, unworthy side of the line. This Book Symposium aims to elaborate on the stories the book tells, with authors Helaine Olen, Julia Mendoza, Sheila Foster, Jess Andors, and Dan Rivera each reflecting on different towns and individuals featured.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

It’s Hard to Save a Town

by  Helaine Olen  

Michelle Wilde Anderson’s The Fight to Save the Town offers a compelling portrait of residents of Stockton, California, Lawrence, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan, and rural Josephine County, Oregon in their fights against the decline of their hometowns. She focuses her attention on the hardy souls who attempt to push back against ongoing neglect and the people who fight to keep libraries open and teens away from drugs. But we must remember that individual victories—when, that is, they occur—can’t fully compensate for decades of neglect, and that the fight to save a town is often harder than it sounds.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

Writing for Abolitionist Futures

by  Julia Mendoza  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson addresses how local governments and nonprofits can create collective ecosystems of care despite decades of “austerity, spatial inequality, and citywide poverty.”  These ecosystems of care are essential not only to building an abolitionist world without police and prisons, but to creating a world with life-affirming social infrastructures that address all systems of inequity.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Book Review Symposium - The Fight to Save the Town

Seeing Like a Chocolate City:
Reimagining Detroit’s Future Through Its
Past

by  Sheila R. Foster  

In The Fight to Save the Town, Michelle Wilde Anderson captures how the rise and fall of Detroit maps onto so many other important cultural, political, social, and economic moments of the twentieth century. As Anderson rightly notes, many of the ways in which the city’s history is commonly told represent a “white gaze on Detroit.” What this narrative often leaves out is the critical role of the Black middle and professional class in stabilizing or holding up the city during the period often associated with the city’s decline.

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

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Essay

Rethinking Strategy After Dobbs

by  David S. Cohen, Greer Donley & Rachel Rebouché  

Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the movement for abortion rights and access finds itself in uncharted territory, and the stakes could not be higher. For abortion rights defenders, this new, post-Roe playing field means adapting their strategy and mindset to confront a new environment without a tether to federal constitutional protection. This Essay, published in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, offers some initial thoughts about what the changed legal landscape means for abortion rights legal advocacy. It offers several suggestions, all of which require a paradigm shift in movement strategy to one that is in some ways modeled after the now-successful movement to overturn Roe. 

Volume 75 (2022-2023)

Election Day

Symposium - 2022 - Safeguarding the Fundamental Right to Vote

The Right to Vote

Baselines and Defaults
by  Yasmin Dawood  

An election undoubtedly requires some rules to ensure that it is ‘free and fair,’ but at what point do these rules diminish the equal opportunity of minority voters to cast a ballot? This Essay addresses these questions by examining the baselines that undergird the right to vote. The author identifies three kinds of baselines—legal, contextual, and normative—and explores the implications of each for voting rights protection.

Volume 74 (2021-2022)