Movement law

In this Article we make the case for movement law, an approach to legal scholarship grounded in solidarity, accountability, and engagement with grassroots organizing and left social movements. In contrast to law and social movements—a field that studies the relationship between lawyers, legal process, and social change—movement law offers a methodology to scholars across substantive areas of expertise to work alongside social movements. We argue that it is essential in this moment of crisis to cogenerate ideas alongside grassroots organizing that aims to transform our political, economic, and social landscape. We identify four methodological moves in the work of a growing number of scholars organically developing methods for movement law. First, movement law scholars attend to modes of resistance by social movements and local organizing. Attending to resistance is in itself significant, for it meaningfully diversifies the voices and sources within legal scholarship. Second, movement law scholars work to understand the strategies, tactics, and experiments of resistance and contestation. By studying the range of these approaches—including but not limited to law-reform campaigns—movement law scholars engage with new pathways to and possibilities for justice. Third, movement law scholars shift their epistemes away from courts and siloed legal expertise and toward the stories, strategies, and histories of social movements. Taking social movement horizons as a starting point denaturalizes the status quo and allows more radical possibilities to emerge. Fourth, movement law scholars embody an ethos of solidarity, collectivity, and accountability with left social movements rather than a hierarchical or oppositional relationship. Writing in solidarity with the grassroots displaces the legal scholar as an individual expert and centers collective processes of ideation and struggles for social change.